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Let’s Play FTL: Faster than Light! Part 2: Things Get Real

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This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series FTL: Faster than Light

Captain’s log, starship Kestrel

Stardate 2012.09.22

 

Sector Two: Pirate Space, Continued

 

When we left off, the Kestrel was in good form: decently armed and shielded, with enough fuel and supplies and scrap to last a while. I decide to make the most of it by looking for trouble. It’s time to head into the nebula.

 

After steeling myself that way, the rest of Sector Two ends up as an anti-climax. I fight off two separate boarding parties in the nebula  by the simple expedient of rushing my crew into the med-bay, where they heal faster than the boarders can hurt them. The only hostile ship I meet lacks the firepower to pierce my upgraded shield, resulting in a decidedly one-sided fight. Buying a scrap recovery arm (which gives me +10% to all future scrap income!) rounds off my time in the sector. With the Rebel hot on my heels, I briefly debate looking around a little more, but eventually decide to play it safe. Off to Sector Three we go!

 

Sector Three: Engi-Controlled Sector

 

The aptly named Engi are a race of sentient machines, lousy in hand-to-hand combat but great with repairs. They’re also friendly to the Federation, which makes Engi space that much more pleasant to traverse.

 

Right off the bat, I hit the jackpot. An Engi ship, thinking I’m a pirate, hastily offers up its cargo of scrap. I demur, telling them I’m friendly:

 

Do I look that scary?

 

But the Engi go ahead and offer me the scrap anyway, to help me on my long voyage.

 

Altruism is so rare among FTL’s NPCs, it sticks in the mind when it does occur.

 

Thanks, Engi! And it’s a good thing, too – I’m perilously low on fuel. The red-highlighted “2” in the top-left means I only have enough fuel for two more jumps! One jump away there’s a shop… and there, I find a cloaking device for sale. I want that cloaking device, but buying it would consume most of my scrap, leaving precious little for fuel.

 

I roll the dice and buy the cloaking device anyway. And a couple of jumps later, my gamble pays off when I first hoover up some more scrap, then – just as I was about to run out of fuel – find another shop. The whole crew probably heard my sigh of relief!

 

The rest of the sector proceeds smoothly enough, with the Kestrel able to easily defeat foe after foe. It goes so smoothly, in fact, that I get a bit cocky and end up taking too much time to explore. When I finally make it to the exit, the Rebel is waiting for me. And for the first time during this playthrough, I run from a fight. The Artemis missile launcher comes into play just long enough to disable the Rebel’s weapons, and then once the jump drive is charged, it’s off to Sector Four.

 

Sector Four: Engi Homeworlds

 

On my first three runs, I spent scrap as fast as it came in to upgrade the Kestrel. This time I’ve been saving up, and now it pays off. Right off the bat, I find a shop, and this time I hit the jackpot. Specifically, the shop sells a weapon pre-igniter, which will allow me to begin a battle with fully charged weapons, and an ion blaster, which will allow me to efficiently disable enemy systems. Combined with my burst laser, I should be able to start a fight by taking down the enemy shields with my pre-ignited arsenal, then ripping apart the enemy’s weapons. After that, all I should have to do is mop up. Should.

 

 

Then the next few enemies I meet teach me about the dangers of assumption:

 

 

Specifically, “starting a fight by taking down the enemy shields with my pre-ignited arsenal” only works if I actually have the firepower to take down the enemy shields. But as of Sector Four, the enemy ships are all now sporting 2 points of shields – on a par with my own. With a burst laser 2, a heavy laser, and an ion blaster, I could punch through level 2 shields if I fired every weapon at once, and hit. But at first, I lack the power to actually fire all these weapons, and I can’t count on guaranteed hits! The bottom line: the enemies have more time to hurt me, often with newer and scarier weapons, before I can silence them.

 

By the time I make it to the next shop, several jumps later, the Kestrel looks like this:

 

Oww, that hurt…

 

Not only am I almost out of fuel again, but the “Hull” bar in the top-left is now yellow, less than half-full. If that reaches zero, it’s curtains for the Kestrel. That I owe to a Rebel with a missile launcher, which ignores my precious 2-point shields! It took my own last-ditch missile – not the starting Artemis, but a hulking breach launcher I picked up along the way – to save the day.

 

With the Kestrel in for some much needed refuelling and repair, this is a good time to ponder battle tactics. I have a whopping 25 missiles – perhaps I should actually use them, say as part of my pre-ignited opening salvo? Buying a couple of new missiles is cheaper, and safer, than fixing a hull that’s been turned into Swiss cheese.

 

The shop, welcome as it is, also poses its own frustrations. Specifically, I have 112 scrap available. My priorities are repairs (38 scrap) and fuel (I want to buy the station’s whole stock, which will cost 18 scrap), totalling 56 scrap. The shop also stocks a drone control (80 scrap), which would be nice but isn’t essential, and a crew teleporter (75 scrap), which I lack the manpower to use right now, but will be essential later on. I would love to buy the drone control, the teleporter, or both, but – I – don’t – have – the – scrap! I do have some spare equipment – a couple of different missile launchers, a presently unusable anti-boarder drone – I could sell, but I don’t know if I’ll need them in the future.

 

Without enough scrap to buy what I want, this is the definition of “tantalising”.

 

With a rueful sigh, I pay for the fuel and repairs. Since I don’t want to sell anything, that leaves me with 56 scrap, enough to upgrade my ship’s reactors in lieu of buying anything else at the shop. Maybe that “first strike” tactic will work if I can throw an even bigger first volley…

 

With the Kestrel ready to head into the unknown again, this is also probably a good time to wrap up this instalment of the LP. After the relative ease of the first few sectors, things are getting hairy for Han, Leia and King. Will they survive their journey?! Tune in to the next part of the LP to find out!

Let’s Play FTL: Faster than Light! Part 1: The Voyage Begins

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This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series FTL: Faster than Light

It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships have overrun most of the Galactic Federation.  During the battle, Federation spies managed to steal secret plans to the Rebel’s ultimate weapon, the REBEL FLAGSHIP, an armoured behemoth with enough power to obliterate an unwary player. Pursued by the Rebel armada, Captain Peter races home aboard his starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can bring victory in this game…

 

Captain’s log, starship Kestrel

Stardate 2012.09.20

 

Introduction

 

Three times I’ve attempted this journey. Three times I’ve failed, the Kestrel – the game’s starting ship – turned into so much space junk. Now, by the grace of the alien artefact known as the “New Game” button, I can make a fourth attempt.

 

The Kestrel, hopefully the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy

 

For this try, I’ll use the Kestrel again. There are other ships available in the game, and I’ve unlocked one (the Torus), but I want to try to see this through with the Kestrel first. The Kestrel packs a well-rounded punch, mounting a powerful burst laser and an ammo-chewing but potentially devastating  missile launcher. Once I upgrade its energy shield, it should see me easily through the first few of the game’s eight sectors (each sector is progressively harder). Its starting crew of three is too small, especially when considering there are four systems (helm, engines, weapons, shields) to be manned, but c’est la vie.

 

After naming my initial crewmembers “Han”, “Luke”, and “Leia”, and ensuring the difficulty is set to “Easy”, it’s time to begin this journey.

 

Sector One: Civilian Space

 

I chose option 2. In this game, discretion is often the better part of valour!

 

The first sector begins uneventfully. The Kestrel skirts an asteroid field, buys fuel at a space station, and ignores a distress beacon (our mission comes first!). On our fourth jump, we meet our first Rebel.

 

 

Several barrages of the burst laser neutralise his weaponry before he can do too much harm, and when he tries to flee, another barrage does the same for his jump drive. Beaten, the Rebel tries to surrender. We refuse. We need the scrap metal from his hull: scrap is the game’s currency, used for purchasing weapons, upgrading components, recruiting crew, and paying for fuel and repairs. Upgrades are life. Scrap is life. And soon enough, we have more of it. The scrap quickly goes into upgrading our shielding system, and onto the next beacon we go.

 

This time it’s another Rebel, a small transport. I demand surrender. The Rebel refuses, and manages to flee in one piece. I growl, and jump away to the next beacon. Upon consulting the star map, I see the Rebel fleet has now arrived in sector! The Rebel main fleet begins each sector several jumps behind the player, and it’s not a wise idea to let it catch up – running into fleet forces a high-risk, practically zero-return battle. However, I’m still well ahead, giving me the luxury of exploring the sector a bit more. A hidden Federation outpost gives me a bit of scrap and a quest to rescue a Federation base in the next sector, but my luck doesn’t hold up at the next location.

 

I should have listened to my own advice about “discretion” and “valour”.

 

While boarding a space station to look for survivors, Luke is struck down by a fatal illness. The measly scrap I pick up seems a lousy compensation for losing one of my scarce crew.

 

I roll the dice again. One more look around before I head off to the next sector… and what should I run into but an enemy, a Mantis fighter.

 

This Mantis bit off more than he could chew.

 

The Mantes are vicious if they can teleport over to your ship, but luckily for me, the fighter is too small to have a teleporter. I won’t have to worry about Mantes slaughtering my diminished crew in melee! Our first salvo takes out the Mantis weapon battery, our second hits the shields, and the third reduces the Mantis to scrap. I hightail it to the sector exit one step ahead of the Rebels.

 

Picture of the Kestrel as at the end of Sector One

 

Sector Two: Pirate Space

 

For this sector, I had a choice of heading into either pirate or rebel space. The pirates seemed like easier foes, so off that way I went!

 

Along the way, I stop off to rescue the Federation base I heard about in the last sector. The Rebel ship attacking the base turns out to be just a scout – no match for the Kestrel – and soon I have not only more scrap, but a quest reward! After saving the base, I acquire a new crewman – a Rockman alien named King – and a new weapon, a heavy laser. The laser doesn’t seem too shabby, but the really big prize is the Rockman. Not only was I dangerously short-handed with only Han and Leia left, but Rockmen are great in their own right. They’re tough and immune to fire, which makes them perfect for repairing burning compartments or fighting hand-to-hand.

 

Soon enough, I deal with another Rebel – this one lurking inside an asteroid field – and pour some scrap into upgrading the ship’s power supply, so I can actually use the new laser. Then I investigate another distress beacon, and this time things go my way. It turns out to be a burning space station, and the Rockman promptly earns his pay:

 

Rock on!

 

The grateful scientists on board the station give me a new long-range sensor, and I scope out the sector:

 

The view of Sector Two.

 

As with Sector One, I have some time before the Rebel (the red line at the left) reaches me, so I should make the most of it. I’m in a decent position: I have an adequately armed and shielded (for the early game) ship, and a nice pool of scrap to play with. Where to next? With the sensor, I can see that the yellow triangles represent spaceships. Jumping to those locations will likely lead to battle, but the rewards (read: scrap) could be worth it. On the other hand, I could simply head into the nebula (the pink blob to the right). In the nebula my sensors would be blinded – carrying its own dangers – but the Rebel’s pursuit would also be slowed. In either case, things could go south in a hurry – or I could stumble across a remarkable find that would turn the Kestrel into a killing machine.

 

There is a lot of luck in this game, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing . That chanciness helps create a sense of exploration, a sense that I really am a starship captain racing through the unknown. And it often throws up interesting decisions – even if they’re as simple as, “do I roll the dice?” (see: the asteroid belt and space station back in Sector One).

 

But for now, I’ll have to leave those decisions for another day. “Get out while you’re ahead,” they say, and it looks like a pretty good time for me to close this episode of the LP. Stay tuned for the continuing adventures of the Kestrel, and I’ll see you next time!

 

Civilization V: Gods and Kings – The Verdict

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This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Civilization V
From these humble beginnings, can you build an empire to stand the test of time?

 

For years, new Civilization games (much like a certain other franchise) have followed a process of “two steps forward, one step back”. The original Civilization was a great and seminal game, but Civilization II surpassed it in every way. The third game was a low point in the series, but introduced a number of concepts followed up in the excellent IV. And while I liked V, my ultimate conclusion was that it “it’ll take a future Civ VI to build on the concepts and changes introduced by V.” How does the recent release of Gods and Kings, the expansion pack to V, change this?

 

To answer this question, I think it helps to split up what G&K offers into two categories. In one bucket, we can place the headline-grabbing features wholly new to V: new scenarios, espionage, and religion. Simply put, these are nice, but they’re not worth US$30 (let alone US$50, if you happen to suffer from regional pricing). In the other bucket, we can place the tweaks G&K makes to the core game: AI, diplomacy, units and technologies, and so on. These are the real draw.

 

Starting with espionage and religion, these two features are similar in that they both offer a handy set of bonuses, without reaching so far as to be game-defining. Espionage begins in the mid-game. When a civilisation begins a new technological era, starting with the Renaissance, it receives one spy who can be sent to a rival player’s city, sent to a city-state, or left at home for counterintelligence. Sent to another player’s city, a spy will provide line of sight and early warning about planned attacks, and every X turns, steal a technology (unless he/she is killed by a counterintelligence agent!). Sent to a city-state, the spy will gradually increase relations over time, and can be used to attempt a coup (a roll of the dice that will leave you with either a new city-state ally, or a dead spy). Simple, hands-off (none of the “fiddly agent” problem common to strategy games), elegant, but not decisive.

 

A la carte: religious bonuses in G&K

 

Religion, meanwhile, works off “faith points” which are primarily generated from buildings such as shrines/temples. The more faith points you accumulate, the more missionaries (spread your religion), inquisitors (quash other religions), and Great Prophets (do all the above, and also needed to found the religion!) you can deploy. Founding a religion allows you to pick and choose from a set of bonuses, some of which will apply only to you, some of which will apply to cities of any nationality that follow that particular faith. As only one civilisation per game can choose any given bonus, prioritising faith – and hence, that first Great Prophet – will allow the early bird to catch the worm. I think the importance of religion will depend on play style: I never found it that central, but I can see someone reaping dividends by taking a religion-centric civilisation (such as the Celts, who earn faith from forest tiles), then picking bonuses that allow, say, the purchase of pre-industrial units with faith.

 

Meanwhile, the two scenarios I tried (out of three* that shipped with the expansion) were a mixed bag. Steampunk scenario “Empires of the Smoky Skies”, despite its name, is a breath of fresh air. It’s quick to play: I finished in a single evening. Its mechanics are distinct; in particular, zippy research and construction, plus unique victory conditions, make it a builder’s paradise. And it has a sense of place, of steampunkish whimsy: it’s impossible not to grin when bartering anti-gravity ore with a goggled, top-hatted man named “Ignace Curnow”. In contrast, the “Fall of Rome” scenario was a disappointment. A purely military scenario with no diplomacy, no research, and no religion, it runs headlong into the “Civilization is not a wargame” problem that has dogged scenarios since Civ II.

 

We hope the skies are as friendly as they are smoky

 

Those are G&K’s most visible features. However, iceberg-like, its real significance is what lies below. Here are a few examples:

 

1) The computer player is cleverer (at least on land maps). Time after time, I’ve had to fight for my life – usually against early-game rushes, once against a late-game attempt to snatch up a diplomatic victory. In general, the AI hits the sweet spot where it can offer a thrilling game without actually making me lose. It did drop the ball in one game in which (a) the computer players all ignored the New World (this was a Terra map), and (b) the #1 player declared war on my horribly unprepared self… only to not lift a finger, not even posting a single soldier to our border! (The resulting war ended up one-sided, all right, but not the way I’d feared.) However, this match was very much the exception to a usually positive rule.

 

Heeeeeere they come! Babylonian forces (in teal) attempt an early-game rush.

 

2) Diplomacy, though still not up to the heights the series reached in Civ IV, has improved to the point where the computer feels rational now. That’s more than most strategy games can say!  The computer will ask for a cease-fire when it’s weary and throw in the towel (but without the ridiculously abject capitulations of pre-G&K) when it’s beaten. Even more importantly, it generally will not go to war without a sensible reason, such as border tension, and it can be deterred by a suitable show of force – in one game, the computer massed troops on our border while I was busy fighting another war, only to back down once I rushed an army home! Not only is this good strategy on the computer’s part, it does a lot to aid my suspension of disbelief and hence, my enjoyment.

 

3) The tech tree, the available units, and their upgrades are better designed. Remember the abortive archer upgrade path, or the ease of beelining for mechanised infantry (which made tanks redundant)? Gone. Games ending before I got a chance to play with aircraft and other late-game units? Well, now that G&K has added Great War-era aircraft, I have story after story to tell about how airpower transformed my campaigns. The effect was almost as steampunkish, and certainly as cool, as anything in Empires of the Smoky Skies! It’s not perfect – the devastating Gatling guns unlock a little too early – but it’s much better than what we had before.

 

The Iroquois mass along my northern border while my main army fights Greece in the southwest.

 

I could list more incremental improvements. Refinements to one of Civ V’s best new features, city-state diplomacy.  Notably faster performance on my computer. But the gist, I think, would be the same. The best reason to buy G&K isn’t to see spies, or prophets, or steampunk airships. The best reason to buy G&K is to see how it enables Civ V to realise its potential, and I think it’s telling that the more I played G&K, the more I liked it.

 

At the end of the day, my recommendation is straightforward. If you hated the base game, Gods and Kings will do nothing to change your mind. If you liked the base game, however, Gods and Kings is worth your cash. It offers subtle but real enhancements, and irons out several of the flaws that previously marred Civ V. Its more visible additions – espionage, religion, scenarios – are merely icing on the cake. A good expansion.

 

* Despite its historical setting, the third scenario, “Into the Renaissance” starts players with just one city and a settler!  This didn’t quite appeal to me, though I may revisit the scenario in the future.

 

We hope you enjoyed this post! To quickly find this post, and our other reviews, click the “reviews” tab at the top of this page.

 

Resources

 

Buy Civilization V: Gods and Kings from Amazon.com

The four-city Tradition start, for use on Emperor and up. I’ll have to try this sometime!

 

The basis of my review

 

Time spent with the game: I estimate 30-40 hours.

 

What I played: One game on King as Austria (aborted). One game on Prince as Austria (won via the science victory). One game on Prince as Carthage (won, science). Two games on King as Korea (a pre-G&K civilisation) (won, science). One attempt at the Fall of Rome scenario (aborted). One attempt at the Empires of the Smoky Skies scenario on Emperor (lost). These were mostly on land-heavy maps: Continents, Terra, and Europe.

 

What I didn’t play: The “Into the Renaissance” scenario. The remaining difficulty settings and civilisations. Archipelago and similar maps.

Who wants a walk-on role in my XCOM: Enemy Unknown squad?

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This entry is part 2 of 12 in the series XCOM: Enemy Unknown/XCOM 2

 

Calling all readers, aspiring alien-hunters, and Guile-haired jumpsuit-wearers! With XCOM: Enemy Unknown‘s release just a month and a half away, Earth needs a few* brave** men and women. As in the original X-Com, players will be able to rename their soldiers at will, and for the XCOM game diary I’m planning, I’d love to name my troopers after you guys. Though I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and incoming plasma, it’ll be exciting while it lasts! Who’s with me?! Do you want to live forever?!

 

Ahem. If you’re interested, leave a comment below and I’ll add your name to the bottom of this post. Once the game is out, I’ll probably either create a new post with all the custom-named soldiers and their current status, or just expand on this post. So check back in a couple months’ time!

 

* at least

** or “foolhardy”

 

The roll call thus far

“Beefeater”

“Froggy”

“Josh” (wants to be first into battle)

“LeSquide”

“Kat”

“Talorc” (who wants a rocket launcher)

“Veloxi” (wants a sniper rifle)

“Hikaru Usada” (wants… to be last out of the dropship)

“Riztro” (great psi bait)

“Rebecca W”

“Wolfox”

“Farnsworth” (wants to hang back and lob the odd grenade)

“Thasero”

“Gunner”

“2K Alan”

“Elyscape”

“Bruce Geryk”

“Swordlily”

“Xanomon”

“Calistas”

Trade, trade, glorious trade! First gameplay video of Europa Universalis IV highlights new trade system

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This entry is part 1 of 12 in the series Europa Universalis IV

Hot on the heels of Paradox’s announcement of Europa Universalis IV, studio boss Johan Anderson has presented the first gameplay video! Courtesy of Gamespot:

That video’s highlight, for me, is the new trade system (which starts at 3:54). Placing trade routes on the map (linking the old EU “centres of trade”) appears to been inspired by Empire: Total War‘s excellent but horribly underappreciated system. However, it appears Paradox is adding its own flair. This Destructoid interview explains:

 

“So what we’ve done is added in a system of static trade routes, so the trade flows along from the world into Europe, and your job is to dip money out of them as they go by. The way you do this… firstly you have your trusty merchant that you can send to various points along the routes to convince them to suck more wealth down to you rather than have the locals cream off the profits.

The second part of your trade empire is territory. If you take the Portuguese empire you’ll see strings of bases along their trade routes, so if you do the same thing you’ll be able to suck more trade home to Portugal and make yourself wealthier.

The third part is the fleet which will help you control trade in areas. We’re going to make small ships trade ships and big ships combat ships. So the small ships, you can send them off to, say, the Arabian Sea where the trade will split between going around to Africa and going up to Eastern Europe, and if you increase your power there you can steer the trade to where you want to.”

Trade ceases to be a merchant placement mini-game, and looks set to become far more connected to conquest, colonization, exploration, and diplomacy. No longer do you have to conquer entire countries to get a gold mine in a specific province, you can use your fleet and strategic bases to control the flow of trade on your own terms. Previously the system was very automated “and the moment you start talking about automation, the feature has a problem.”

 

As the above video highlights at 6:18, trade routes will also shift over the course of the game (away from the Mediterranean and towards the Atlantic, once the routes around the Cape of Good Hope and to the Americas open up).

 

The net effect, hopefully, will be to strengthen one of EU3‘s weaker aspects: the naval game. Not only were individual naval battles not very satisfying (they tended to boil down to “who brought the most ships?”), but EU3 only modelled one of the uses of seapower (being able to land troops on the enemy coast), while neglecting the need to protect overseas trade routes. Based on what we know so far, it sounds as though EU4‘s naval game will be much more interesting, which should benefit maritime powers such as Portugal, the Netherlands, and England->Great Britain. I look forward to seeing how this works in the final game — and to seeing what else Paradox has in store for us.

What we know about Wargame: AirLand Battle

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This entry is part 5 of 12 in the series Wargame: European Escalation/AirLand Battle/Red Dragon

#6 – May 2013 – The game’s preorder beta has begun! Check out my impressions of the beta!

 

#5 – 16 February 2013: Big news! The game’s website is now up, and so is the dev diary. Recent preview include PCGMedia’s and RTSGuru’s.

 

#4 – 24 August 2012: Confirmation of the four new nations! Sweden, Canada, Denmark, Norway.

 

#3 – 18 August 2012: Some details out from Gamescom, if you can read French! The highlights, according to Google Translate, include a co-op campaign and confirmation Sweden and Canada will be in the game.

 

#2 – 14 August 2012: . In response on a question I asked on the official forum about AirLand Battle‘s “dynamic campaign”, an Eugen team member stated:

 

Dynamic means fully dynamic -so much more than in W:EE :D

 

That sounds promising to me!

 

#1 – 12 August 2012: Eugen Systems and publisher Focus Home have announced Wargame: AirLand Battle, the upcoming (2013) sequel to European Escalation! I’ve quoted the full press release at the bottom of this post. The highlights are as follows:

 

1) The new game still takes place in the 1975-1985 time period, and the protagonists are still NATO and the Warsaw Pact; however, the action has shifted north to Scandinavia.

2) Fixed-wing aircraft will be in the game! This is a change from EE, where the only aircraft are helicopters.

3) There will be four new countries in the game. The developers have all but confirmed one of them  will be Canada, with the other three being chosen from amongst Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland.

4) The number of units has increased to 750 (more than double the 361 in EE!), of which 150 are planes.

5) Edited in due to my bad memory: AirLand Battle will have a “dynamic campaign”! This is the feature that has me most excited, as I felt the campaign was the weakest part of the original game.

6) You can view the first teaser trailer below:

 

 

I’ll update this post as news about ALB emerges, so stay tuned!

 

 

PARIS- Aug. 10, 2012 – Released in early 2012, Wargame: European Escalation by Eugen Systems became the new benchmark in real-time strategy games, praised by critics and players alike.

 

Today, its sequel, Wargame: AirLand Battle, has been unveiled for the first time in this teaser video. Planned for released in 2013, Wargame: AirLand Battle will bring the series to a brand new dimension. Today’s video gives a glimpse of the spectacular new features to come!

 

Wargame: AirLand Battle will be presented for the first time at Gamescom 2012 in Cologne next week at the Focus booth in the business area (Hall 4.2, Stand I-050a) and at Koch Media’s booth in the public area (Hall 7.1, stand B051 – B041)!

 

While the first Wargame made a splash with its powerful engine, Wargame: AirLand Battle will be the series’ leap forward by bringing a level of detail never before seen in a real-time strategy game. The new version of the IRISZOOM Engine™ will display spectacular graphics with a wide variety of units, scenery, and impressive topography reproduced from satellite maps, all of which are visible in today’s teaser.

 

Just like its predecessor, Wagame: AirLand Battle takes players through a series of conflicts commanding NATO and Warsaw Pact troops between 1975 & 1985 at a turning point of the Cold War. In this episode, war rages in Northern Europe, notably Scandinavia, whose architecture and magnificent landscapes are faithfully recreated in the game.

 

Wargame: AirLand Battle allows players to command all military resources of the Cold War era from tanks to planes. A total of 150 planes strengthen the playable arsenal of the game, from fighters to bombers to electronic warfare planes. Four new nations and their vehicles join the original eight from the first installment, making a total of over 750 vehicles and combat units rendered in realistic detail! Wargame: AirLand Battle also brings authenticity to the next level thanks to a new weapons system, better handling of fire effects, and a new Urban Combat Interface (UCI) allowing for battle inside cities.

 

The solo campaign is composed of several new dynamic campaigns, during which players manage all aspects of battle by leading each squad of the Theater of Operation and making good use of reinforcements and strategic support. Wargame: AirLand Battle still allows customization of armies in solo and multiplayer modes thanks to the ‘Deck’ system, which is now being enhanced with an integrated ‘viewer’. Ultimately, each decision made will have an impact on the tactical outcome of battles and evolution of the global conflict! Prepare to re-enter the Cold War in 2013!

Bleak, clever cyberpunk: the world of Deus Ex: Human Revolution

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This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Deus Ex: Human Revolution

A society consists of:

 

A handful of ultra-powerful ultra-rich;

Criminal lords who control everything not controlled by the ultra-rich;

Police whose only principle of operation is maintenance of the status quo;

Hordes of poor people starving in the streets;

Absolutely no middle class whatsoever.

 

Nonetheless, the society manages to remain at a high technological level.

 

– The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés

 

At first glance, one might think that Deus Ex: Human Revolution, last year’s cyberpunk action-RPG from Square Enix, falls into the above trap. A walk around its first hub area (which I’ve just completed), the Detroit of 2027, appears to tick every box. The game’s first act takes place over a single evening, so the sky is black and forbidding. The streets are filthy. Graffiti is everywhere. The beat cops all wear riot gear. The outside world appears no better: newspapers refer to an ongoing “Australian civil war”. At times, the exaggerated dystopia shades into silliness: why are middle-class characters living in the same garbage-ridden slum as the local arms dealer?

 

The grrrritty future: Detroit in 2027, from Deus Ex: Human Revolution

 

But dig deeper, and you’ll find more to Human Revolution than Generic Science-Fiction Dystopia. This is a world defined, above all, by one social issue, one conflict – transhumanism, in the form of cybernetic augmentation. This raises several questions. First, there’s the usual debate about the morality of humans “playing God”, evident in conversations with other characters, in product blurbs from cybernetics manufacturer Sarif Industries and in radio broadcasts from anti-augmentation terrorists Purity First. It’s done well, it’s done plausibly – the pro/anti-augmentation slogans would fit right into today’s culture wars – but it’s also what we’d expect from a work that tackles the topic. In other words, well-executed but par for the course. If you are already familiar with this debate, from other works of science fiction, then Human Revolution won’t do much to sway your mind.

 

The game’s real strength isn’t what it has to say about transhumanism in general – it’s what it has to say about transhumanism in this particular world, with this particular technology and set of trade-offs. The advantages to cybernetic augmentation are obvious – you get to play with them. Want to jump like an Olympian’s dream, fling dumpsters and vending machines as if they were tissue-paper, see through walls, turn yourself temporarily invisible? These are merely some of the enhancements available to hero Adam Jensen, and making use of them is what Human Revolution’s gameplay is all about. More prosaically, cybernetics also fill the role of real-world prosthetics – allowing people who’ve been injured or maimed to live better lives. These positives are real.

 

The glittering future: the Sarif Industries lobby

 

But there is a heavy price. Cyborgs don’t lose their souls. They don’t become evil or insane or deranged. They don’t go on homicidal rampages. The game is not so crude as that. They do become dependent on an expensive drug, “neuropozyne”, to prevent tissue rejection and eventual agonising death. What happens when a cyborg runs out of neuropozyne, from the hints we’re given (and from this live-action trailer, in the form of a Purity First propaganda video) is not pretty – and there are “people” in Human Revolution, such as pimps looking for leverage over their girls, who’ll take advantage of that. This trade-off isn’t metaphysical, or moral, or airy-fairy and abstracted. This trade-off is grimly practical. Would you make it? Human Revolution’s appeal lies in its ability to make us ponder that question – and sympathise with those characters who didn’t get a choice.

 

Perhaps my single favourite visual in Human Revolution is a billboard advertising a new opera, “Il Metamorfoso” (see the bottom-left of the screenshot below). The game conveys so much meaning with that one simple little image. What is the “metamorphosis”? We don’t know, but given context and the curved, circuitry-like lines just visible in the ad, we can guess it’s augmentation. What is the opera’s take on it? The “Metamorfoso’s” demonic leer, and the way his hair flows into the sinister red background of the ad, speak volumes. Augmentation, the ad seems to tell us, is a deal with the devil. Revel in its power, but know it has consequences.

 

The commercial future: Detroit billboards in Human Revolution

 

It’s that kind of clever touch that draws me to Human Revolution. This is no exercise in mindless nihilism. It’s a game whose creators put real thought into its bleak future, into art and aesthetic and concept – and then, as good science fiction writers should do, extrapolated the resulting possibilities, vile or otherwise. It’s a game that respects my intelligence, and I look forward to playing more.

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion – The Verdict

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This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion

 

Space combat has never looked so beautiful: Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion

 

 

The 1990s were the decade of the real-time strategy game, and I played every major one: Herzog Zwei, Dune 2, Command & Conquer, Warcraft 1 and 2, Red Alert, Total Annihilation, Starcraft, Age of Empires 1 and 2. Then I burned out. Done with base-building, peon-sitting, unit-spamming, tactics-light games, I spent the 2000s in RTS-less bliss. Then came the original Sins of a Solar Empire, in 2008, as far removed from its 90s forebears as a game could be. Peon micromanagement was out. Scrapping over a finite number of planets with a finite number of available improvements (a la, I would later realise, Kohan or Rise of Legends), battling over strategic jump lanes, constructing vast capital ships and choosing scarce upgrades were in. I was hooked. Sins brought me back to the RTS fold. Now, four years later and two “mini-expansions” later, developer Ironclad and publisher Stardock have unveiled Sins’ latest incarnation: Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, a deluxe version incorporating every addition made to date, and some new ones to boot. Is it worth your while?

 

The key point about Rebellion is that, underneath those additions, this is the same Sins we know and love. Sins has always succeeded as an exercise in juggling resources: Do I use my main force to push on Deucalion, or do I hold it back to defend Calliope? Do I invest in a dreadnought that can eventually hit an entire fleet with one missile barrage, or do I bank on an early-game rush with a carrier? How do I split my cash between the fleet, fixed defences, economy, diplomacy, and research? Rebellion does nothing to mess that up. By itself, that makes it worthwhile for a series newcomer.

 

For series veterans, the answer becomes more complicated. Rebellion’s new features fall into three main categories:

 

New units at either end of the size spectrum: titans, gigantic ships limited to one per player; and little corvettes. While the titans are Rebellion’s highest-profile addition, I’m not convinced they quite live up to the hype. Oh, they’re spectacular to watch, and they shake up the game dynamics the moment they come into play: it was horrifying and yet cool to see an AI titan take apart my level 5 Marza dreadnought (only one level away from Missile Barrage!) like the proverbial knife through butter. But what do they actually achieve? They’re a very pretty way to break stalemates – and that already existed, in the form of endgame superweapons such as the TEC novalith cannon. The titans (which unlock at research level 4) effectively pull forward that endgame stalemate-busting power into the midgame, which is satisfying but not as novel as some of Rebellion’s other changes.

 

The Advent Loyalist titan prepares to go into action.

 

New factions: Each of the game’s three races, the TEC, Advent and the Vasari, is now split into two sub-factions (Loyalists and Rebels) who share most of their units, but have unique titans, corvettes, and special bonuses. Two of the sub-factions deserve special mention. From early in the game, the TEC Rebels can break one of Sins’ key rules (players can only expand as quickly as they can fight their way past the neutral forces occupying most of the map): they can research a “truce amongst rogues”, which allows them to go unmolested by neutrals and space pirates – and thus, expand hilariously fast. This isn’t an instant win: new colonies in Sins start well in the red and require an initial investment to make them profitable, so the faster the Rebels grow, the more they have to invest. However, while “infinite colony spam” might leave the Rebels vulnerable at first (something I suspect would be a liability in player-vs-player multiplayer), it pays off hugely once those colonies pull into the black – giving the Rebels the most unique feel of any faction. Meanwhile, the Vasari Loyalists – hurrying to gather the resources needed to flee an ancient foe – get the ability to strip-mine planets down to a barren husk, as well as a titan that can salvage resources by chomping enemy space fleets. Not only does this emphasise the Vasari’s strengths at hit-and-run war, it also nicely fits the game’s lore.

 

New victory conditions: Whereas previous Sins instalments had two victory conditions (“kill ‘em all” and “accumulate X diplomacy points”), Rebellion adds “destroy the enemy flagship”, “level the enemy homeworld”, “research a special, fantastically expensive technology”, and “occupy a heavily-fortified neutral world”. If I had to name Rebellion’s most significant improvement, this might just be it: now I can finish large maps in a reasonable amount of time! Unfortunately, it’s also a gigantic missed opportunity: the AI doesn’t understand the two potentially most significant victory conditions. The flagship and homeworld victories are fine: the AI takes good care of those (if anything, it’s too cautious – the flagship is a big help on the front lines early on). The problem is with the science and occupation victory conditions. While the AI seems vaguely aware it can win via science (the game once notified me that a computer player was researching the victory technology, and while this was too little, too late since I was bombing its homeworld, it was still nice to see), it completely fails to grasp the concept of a victory countdown. When I am about to win, my opponents should try to stop me – that’s why the game broadcasts warnings about other players’ impending victory! Rebellion’s computer opponents, in contrast, do nothing. No last-minute rush, no desperate attack, just placid acceptance of their impending loss. Done properly, the science and occupation victories could have transformed Rebellion’s endgame, turning it from the traditional strategy slog into a desperate and tense and interesting race to survive until the countdown ran out. Instead, against the computer, they’re just “I win” buttons. This omission is all the more disappointing because it’s a problem the RTS genre solved almost 10 years ago: as far back as 2003, the computer player in Rise of Nations knew enough to go for my throat when I built enough Wonders of the World to trigger that game’s victory countdown*.

 

My Vasari Loyalist fleet closes in on the defenders of the special “occupation victory” planet.

 

At the end of the day, Rebellion is a good game: its Sins heritage sees to that. As the latest and greatest Sins instalment, I would unquestionably recommend it to a strategy fan new to the series. On the other hand, while Rebellion offers enough improvement to be worth a look for experienced fans, it falls just, painfully short of its potential.  It was worth the time and money I put into it, but had the new victory conditions been better implemented, it could have offered more. A good game, but not the breath of fresh air for the series it could have been.

 

* To say nothing of the TBS genre, which decisively solved that problem with Shogun 2’s realm divide.

 

We hope you enjoyed this post! To quickly find this post, and our other reviews, click the “reviews” tab at the top of this page.

 

Resources

Sins of a Solar Empire wiki (most of the advice here seems pre-Rebellion, but still worth a look for new players)

 

The basis of my review

Length of time spent with the game: Around 19 hours (including time spent with the beta).

What I have played: One single-player game won, on Unfair difficulty, as each faction except the Vasari Rebels. One co-op game as the Vasari Rebels, approximately to the halfway point. One aborted single-player game on Cruel difficulty.

What I have not played: PvP multiplayer.

Armageddon Empires: lessons from a five-year-old indie strategy game

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The main map of Armageddon Empires. My hand of cards is visible at the bottom.

 

Two high-profile strategy games came out recently, Civilization V: Gods and Kings and Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, and I might as well spoil my forthcoming reviews by saying I like both of them. Each offers incremental but tangible improvements over its predecessor; each is a worthy addition to its franchise. However, for sheer enjoyment, they might just be trumped by a third title I discovered around the same time: Armageddon Empires, the 2007 board/collectible card game-inspired, turn-based strategy title from Vic Davis and his one-man studio Cryptic Comet.

 

By way of background, AE takes place on a future Earth devastated by a four-way war between humans, mutants, and two invading alien armies. Players explore a randomly generated map, gather resources, amass armies and heroes, research better equipment, and ultimately crush their opponents. In other words, AE is a 4X (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) game, the post-apocalypse’s answer to Civilization. However, whereas conventional 4X games allow players to build anything they have researched and can afford, AE represents available units and structures as cards – players are limited to building what they have in their hand at any one time.  Certain card types can be created and added to a hand in mid-match, but the basic building blocks of gameplay – tanks, troops, fortresses, heroes – must be included in a deck before a match (hence the board game/CCG element)*.

 

That’s the waiter’s description – so what are the chef’s secrets?

 

My invincible endgame army.

 

The first thing that makes AE special is its twist on the genre formula: most strategy games are built around sprawl, but AE is built around scarcity. Most of the wasteland is just that, useless and barren, save for a few resource-gathering sites. Armies are finite, limited by deck size. New units are produced from one source (the player’s hand of cards – though they can then be deployed to any friendly base), so no juggling multiple cities, factories, or build queues. This has several implications. First, as Kieron Gillen pointed out, it’s consistent with the game’s post-apocalyptic theme: it stands to reason that in this world, there just is not that much to go around. Second, it does away with the usual bane of the strategy genre, the “I have to babysit all this?!” syndrome. Last of all, when players can form a stack of doom out of four units (see the screenshot above) and (at least on the default settings) there are no more than two or three main armies to manage, this doesn’t just affect the gameplay mechanics (“fewer, but more interesting decisions”) – it also makes every stack more distinct, and hence easier to identify, easier to grow attached to. (This is a topic to which I’ll return.)

AE’s second distinctive feature is that, like Distant Worlds and Conquest of Elysium 3, it gets exploration right. Every game map is bound to contain a few special locations (the number can be tweaked at startup), and these run the gamut. Named, especially juicy resource-gathering sites: the Camps (+3 manpower, whoo!), the Slave Pit and its overseers, the cannibal-infested Destroyed City. Abandoned strongholds: the White Base**, the Crashed Mothership, the Mecha Design Lab. Hidden goodies: a desiccated corpse still clutching a suitcase nuke. This works from a mechanical perspective: it encourages early-game exploration, rewards players for investing in recon units, and offers a trade-off: do I muster troops to take out a defended site, or do I use them to hit one of the other players? But crucially, it also adds to the theme. Scavenging is part and parcel of any post-apocalyptic world, and AE’s specific choice of locations adds further flavour. What do the slave pits and cannibal ruins tell us about the catastrophe that befell the world? What does the gaudy casino defended by gangsters tell us about how some survivors have managed to make their living? And just who was that poor devil with the suitcase nuke?

 

New inventions that my scientist can cook up.

 

The third element that makes AE special is the broadest and most intangible of the three, but also possibly the most important: this game is evocative. For me, every single-player video game is at least partly an exercise in imagination, in temporarily convincing me that I’m not just making pixels blink on a screen – I’m building a city, piloting a spaceship,  saving the world. And this is where AE shines. Partly, this is thanks to the factors I discussed above. Exploration brings the game’s world alive, and the relative scarcity of pieces in play means that (a little like a squad-based game or tactical RPG) it’s easy to construct narratives about the Vengeance mech you always sent where the fighting was fiercest, or the plucky marines who seized the alien HQ with a surprise landing. Partly, this is due to the way so many game mechanics revolve around hero units, giving AE a human face. New inventions (see the above screenshot – better vehicle armour, man-portable laser cannon, tactical and strategic nukes…) don’t spring from a well of “science points” – they come from scientist heroes, who have to roll dice against their skills. That suitcase nuke won’t magically walk to another player’s base – a saboteur hero, such as the humans’ Valentine Kusanagi**, has to infiltrate the hex and make a successful roll. Partly, this is due to inspired card art. The Colossus mech is one of the scariest units in the game, and to see why, look at the screenshot below. That thing has to be the size of a skyscraper! Partly, it’s due to the way different game mechanics interact in clear and intuitive ways: my scouts found a nest of survivors in a destroyed city, which let me call in a tactician and some Imperial Marines, who secured a forward outpost, which I used as an airbase to launch a nuclear strike and win the game. Partly, it’s due to… I could go on, but the point is AE is so much more than the sum of its parts. I walk away from every match feeling like I enacted a heroic story, and that’s one of the best things I can say about a game.

 

The fruits of science. The Machine Empire’s Colossus is not something I want to face in battle… which is why I have its name written on a hydrogen bomb, bottom right.

 

One might wonder why, if AE is so good and has been around for five years, it isn’t also better known. To be sure, it’s not perfect. There’s no in-game tutorial, and while it’s a rare game whose controls I can’t figure out just by messing around, AE’s are sufficiently unintuitive to require reading the manual or a how-to-play guide (I recommend Bill Harris’). Its interface leaves something to be desired, even by indie strategy game standards, and so does its coding – I’ve had to abandon a couple of matches due to glitches. But I don’t think the problem is the rough edges – none of them seriously hurts the gameplay. I think the problem is precisely that AE has been around for five years. It was very much ahead of its time: despite its glowing critical reception, it was not only a TBS, but an indie TBS for the PC, in the days before iPads, hip indie bundles, and the recent renaissance of small/mid-market games.

 

And that really is a shame, because five years on, AE doesn’t just “hold up” – it shines as an example of what this genre can do. More than a very good game, more than a possibly great game, AE is a unique game, packed with lessons in design. This is one game I think every strategy aficionado, and certainly every strategy designer, should play.

 

* There are a couple of exceptions, but this holds true as a general rule.

 

** I also like the shout-outs that Vic Davis scattered throughout the game!

 

Resources

 

Official website, where you can download a demo or buy the game

How-to-play guide, by Bill Harris

 

We hope you enjoyed this retrospective! To quickly find this post, and others like it, click the“features” tab at the top of this page.

Mystery game mode coming to Wargame: European Escalation in July

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Update – 5 July 2012: It’s a mystery no longer: details of Conquest are now on Steam. It’s a territorial victory mode:

 

’CONQUEST’’ for Wargame: European Escalation brings brand new exciting content to extend the conflict.

Defy commanders worldwide in the brand new multiplayer mode: CONQUEST. To be victorious in this mode, in addition to the classic Command Points, you will have to control Victory Sectors (VS) located on the map, until the victory conditions are fully satisfied. In this mode there’s no Scoring System related to the destruction of your adversary’s units, only controlling territories will grant you victory. 7 maps have been adapted or created to fit this new mode, where you can either challenge players or AI.

 

Note that since it’s a “free DLC”, you’ll have to install it separately. For anyone who’s new to the game and wondering whether it’s worth buying, check out my full review!

 

Update – 4 July 2012: Patch notes are out! It’s a long list, but the highlights include a new gameplay mode (“Conquest”) and continued balance tweaks. I have to say, I’m very happy with Eugen’s post-release support for this game. Developers, this is how you treat your customers!

 

Original post: Back in April, Eugen Systems patched a new game mode into Wargame: European Escalation, and now the game’s Facebook page has this to say:

 

Second free DLC coming in July !

Get ready to confront your opponents in new multiplayer mode!

 

There are no additional details for now, but I’ll keep you posted as more emerge.

 

Tactics X-COM: Jagged Ogre Chronicles, or a guide to squad-level strategy/tactics/RPGs

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This is a good time to be a fan – as I am – of games that mix squad-level strategy and RPG mechanics. Last year saw the PSP release of the excellent Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, a labour of love that blended fine-crafted gameplay, a mature story, and gorgeous production values. This year won’t lack in quantity: it’s already seen a Jagged Alliance remake for PC and the recent PSP launch of Gungnir. Two more titles are due out in a few months (Firaxis’ XCOM: Enemy Unknown for PC, and Atlus’ Growlanser: Wayfarer of Time for PSP) and we may well see a third soon, Goldhawk’s Xenonauts (PC).

 

The above names suggest this is a pretty broad genre, and in fact, I don’t think there is a single squad-level strategy/RPG genre so much as there are several distinct subgenres, spread across PCs and home and portable consoles. As such, this is also a good time to review each subgenre – which games it contains, what makes it distinctive, how it compares to the others, and how it’s faring.

 

 

Type 1: the “squad-based strategy game with RPG elements”

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV6b0k7edag&feature=player_detailpage#t=350s

 

Typified by the Jagged Alliance series and the first three X-Com games, this subgenre is largely PC-based (notwithstanding the odd console port) and driven by Western developers. These games share two overarching attributes. First, they emphasise the “strategy” part of “strategy/RPG”, and second, they’re closer to the “realistic” than to the “cinematic” end of the spectrum (at least compared to the other categories!). These manifest in a few ways:

 

  • There isn’t much in the way of character customisation or special abilities. Different troopers have different statistics – marksmanship, strength, etc – and, in Jagged Alliance 2, different passive bonuses (e.g. night operations or automatic weapons). However, soldiers lack RPG-style active abilities, and they usually don’t have classes – they certainly don’t in X-Com and JA. What does distinguish soldiers is their equipment (which, in the absence of classes, can usually be freely assigned). You won’t mistake a rifleman, a machine gunner, and an anti-tank specialist!

 

  • The same applies to the enemies you fight. In JA2, a black-shirted commando will be both better armed and a better shot than a yellow-shirted militiaman, but actual boss enemies and special abilities (with the exception of a handful in X-Com – psionics and Chrysalids) are rare.

 

  • In the absence of “gamey” levels of health, life is cheap. X-Com, where the most heavily armoured veteran could die to a single unlucky shot, took this to extremes – but even in JA2, a single turn’s volley fire could be lethal. Conversely, the lack of character customisation means that losing one trooper is not the end of the world – especially not in X-Com, with its never-ending pool of recruits! (I seem to recall JA2 was a bit harsher on this front – not only were there finite mercenaries available, but losing too many would make it hard to recruit more. As such, X-Com was best played without reloading, but I doubt JA2 would be so amenable.)

 

  • In the defining games of the genre, there is no scripted campaign – in X-Com and Jagged Alliance, you choose where and when to take the field. This fits with the conceit of these games – you’re the overall commander, in charge of far more than just battle tactics.

 

  • Combat typically requires you to kill/capture every enemy present. However, the battlefields are large, what you can see is limited to your soldiers’ line of sight, and the enemy could be anywhere. As such, battles tend to unfold as a sweep of the map.

 

This subgenre has never regained its 1990s glory days (hence PC gamers lamenting the “death” of squad-based strategy/RPGs), notwithstanding the odd 2000s release such as Silent Storm. However, signs of life remain. As a largely faithful remake of X-Com, Xenonauts falls squarely in this category, and if it lives up to its promising alpha build, that would deliver a welcome breath of air.

 

Type 2: the “tactics game with RPG elements”


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEGueeM7Xd8&feature=player_detailpage#t=58s

 

Fire Emblem (various Nintendo platforms) and Valkyria Chronicles (PS3 for the original game, PSP for the sequels) form a second subgenre, console-based and driven by Japanese developers. (I suspect Jeanne d’Arc for PSP would also fall into this category, but I haven’t played enough to be sure.) What sets these aside from Type 1 games is that they’re a little more stylised, a little more “game-y”, a little more RPG-like. Specifically:

 

  • As with Type 1 games, there still isn’t much in the way of character customisation or special abilities. However, in RPG fashion, realism now plays second fiddle to game logic. FE/VC characters are much more distinct than X-Com troopers, and their abilities and weapons are delineated by class. A “shock trooper” in Valkyria Chronicles will always use a submachine gun rather than a rifle, an engineer will never be able to use a grenade launcher, and so on. Fire Emblem even cheerfully throws in a rock/paper/scissors dynamic between axe-, sword-, and spear-wielding classes.

 

  • Meanwhile, much like trash mobs in an RPG, individual enemies in Type 2 games tend to be clearly weaker than the player’s squad members. However, watch out for bosses!

 

  • In Fire Emblem, characters can still die easily in the hands of a careless player. However, as with Type 1 games, the lack of character customisation means that the loss of one character is not the show-stopper it might otherwise be. (Valkyria Chronicles is a little more forgiving – it gives you a three-turn grace period to call in a medic.)

 

  • Gameplay consists entirely of a scripted campaign with set battles – no strategic metagame here.

 

  • Battles still revolve around sweeping a large map, but this plays out slightly differently. Your objectives are different – most levels require you to capture a specified piece of turf, rather than just clearing out the enemy. However, since enemies typically don’t “wake up” until you move close enough, this encourages you (especially in Fire Emblem) to play slowly and carefully, so as not to trigger an overwhelming enemy response. The result, in Fire Emblem, was precise, meticulous gameplay as I checked enemy characters’ movement ranges, lined up the party in safe areas, and then quickly moved in for the kill. (Valkyria Chronicles was a little different in that its scoring system worked by speed, so it was often “optimal” to run past enemy soldiers and beeline for the objective, but I tended to only play this way when I knew a map very well.)

 

This genre is doing a bit better than Type 1. Valkyria Chronicles never saw a PS3 sequel (2 and 3 came out for PSP, and 3 never made it to the West), but Fire Emblem: Awakening has been announced for 3DS. With luck, we’ll see more of these games in the future.

 

Type 3: the “role-playing game with tactical elements”

 

 

A third subgenre, also primarily console/Japanese, includes Final Fantasy Tactics (PSX/PSP), Tactics Ogre (originally SNES/PSX, but I’m mainly thinking of the PSP remake), Front Mission (various), and Disgaea (various). The dividing line between this and Type 2 can be a little blurry, but in general, the key feature of these games is that they emphasise the “RPG” part of “tactical RPG”.

 

  • By this, I mean Type 3 games share traditional RPGs’ emphasis on character development. Out of battle, there’s plenty of time spent on allocating skill points, navigating often-baroque class trees (this class guide for FFT says it all), and building a super-team. In battle, where a Type 1 or Type 2 character would be limited to moving, attacking, and maybe unlocking doors, Type 3 characters constantly fire off special attacks and unique abilities. This also extends to enemies – regular enemies, not just bosses, frequently have their own nasty abilities.

 

  • Conversely, while some of these games do allow for permanent death (FFT, Tactics Ogre), building up characters takes so much time and effort that I think players would have to be crazy not to reload in the event of their characters dying. (Other games, such as Disgaea, sidestep this problem by not having perma-death in the first place.)

 

  • As with RPGs and Type 2 games, there is a scripted campaign with a set storyline and battles to play through.

 

  • The “tactical” part is still present: battles are played out on strategy-style grid maps and positioning remains a consideration (for example, Tactics Ogre, which encouraged you to use terrain and heavily armoured knights’ special abilities to wall off squishy mages and archers). However, the maps are typically smaller than in Types 1-2, and enemies are typically more aggressive about coming out to meet you. As such, there’s no more “sweeping the battlefield” dynamic.

 

Out of the three subgenres, this one is probably doing the best. While the broader JRPG genre largely disappeared during the HD console era, this subgenre never went away. The PSP in particular is a mecca (FFT, Tactics Ogre, ports of Disgaea 1 and 2…), and new/ported Disgaea games continue to appear (e.g. Disgaea 4 came out for PS3 last year, and Disgaea 3 has made it to Vita). I look forward to seeing, and playing, many more in the future.

 

 

Within these categories, different games have added their own unique twists. For example, the genius of Valkyria Chronicles lay in its control scheme. You didn’t move soldiers by clicking squares on a grid – you took direct control of the selected soldier, using the PS3’s analogue stick to run him or her behind sandbags, into trenches, out of cover and into the open. The camera wasn’t locked isometric – it followed each soldier from a third-person perspective. You didn’t choose targets by selecting them from a list or highlighting their square – you hit a button to bring up a pair of crosshairs, then swung the crosshairs over a selected foe, and finally “pulled” the trigger. Now, VC was still a strategy game, not a shooter – once you lined up a shot, whether it hit was determined by the soldier’s class, equipment and special abilities, not by player skill. Yet, by bringing the immediacy and excitement of an action game, the control scheme contributed tremendously to the overall experience.

 

For another example, consider Disgaea, which relies heavily on terrain and movement. Many battles contain “geo panels” that give a special modifier to anyone standing on them – for example, automatic healing (or automatic damage!) every turn, a bonus to attack, an all-around bonus to enemies, and so on. These special effects are generated by geo symbols, pyramid-shaped objects that also appear on the map. And not only are the geo symbols destructible, but party members can pick other characters (friends and foes) and geo symbols up, then throw them around the map. Many levels rely on this! For example, if 90% of a map is coated in red panels, and two geo symbols placed on the red panels give enemies on red a 6x bonus, trying to play as if the game were FFT would be suicide. The solution: line up a daisy chain of, say, six characters. Have #5 lift #6, have #4 lift #5 (who is still carrying #6), and so on. Eventually, #1 throws #2, who throws #3… all the way to the point where #6 can reach and destroy a “3x enemy boost” geo symbol in one turn, before the computer gets to use those nasty bonuses. Does this make story levels puzzle-like? Probably. But it is an interesting mechanic in its own right, and it does distinguish the game from the rest of the genre.

 

This takes us back to XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which stands out because of the way it blends multiple games and subgenres. The way it breaks down soldiers into classes, with their own equipment loadouts and special abilities, is straight out of Type 3 games. So is the ability to unlock additional, more advanced classes later on. But its frequent use of an action game-style camera reminds me of nothing so much as the intent behind Valkyria Chronicles’ control scheme (or perhaps the Gallop brothers’ cancelled Dreamland Chronicles, which was to have used similar controls), and the frequency of character death is a (key) holdover from the original X-Com. As such, I don’t think it’s possible to draw apples-and-apples comparisons between Firaxis’ XCOM and the originals, or between XCOM and Xenonauts – but this doesn’t bother me in the least. While Firaxis is diverging significantly from the originals’ design, it also seems to be cross-pollinating several excellent strains of squad-level gameplay. We’ll see in a few months’ time how well this works out, but for now I am eager to see what Firaxis can do.

 

And if I had to conclude on one thought, that would be it: eagerness. Whether these games fall into one big genre or three related ones, at their best they combine the strengths of strategy games and RPGs. They offer the satisfaction of out-thinking and out-manoeuvring an opponent; intricate plots – and a focus on named, persistent characters. Just as great characters make great fiction, the stories that arise through gameplay become all the richer when they star characters whom we have nurtured, whom we can identify and remember. I remember the almost-dead warrior in FFT who ended one of the toughest boss fights in the game with one last desperate jump. I could almost feel the desperation in Valkyria Chronicles when three soldiers tried to hold off an enemy tank, and when I got control of my own tank and sent it to their relief, I certainly felt the power. And I remember the fallen heroes of X-Com and Fire Emblem, including veterans who had been with me since the start of the game and who finally gave their lives near the end. I remember these and more.

 

At the end of the day, it’s no coincidence so many of my favourites fall into the categories described above – PC and console, Western and Japanese. I look forward to seeing more of all these in the future, and I hope that if you’re a pure PC or pure console gamer, if you’re familiar with some but not all of the above games, I’ll have piqued your interest ­in the rest

Waaaaaaaaaaaaar! Warlock: Master of the Arcane – The Verdict

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This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Warlock

Warlock: Master of the Arcane is very upfront about what type of game it is. The first word tells you everything you need to know. Warlock – person who uses magic; this part is readily apparent. Add a hyphen, and a second meaning emerges. War-lock – a game where you are, essentially, locked into perpetual war until a lone victor stands atop a pile of skulls.

 

Warlock bears a much-remarked upon resemblance to Civilization V, and is described by its own marketing as a 4X game. The Xs comprise: explore, expand, exploit, exterminate. These factors combine to create a certain expectation in the player, and I do not think that serves Warlock particularly well. Compared to more traditional 4X games, such as the Civilization series or Master of Orion, Warlock has a narrower, deeper focus. If you enter the game with the wrong expectations, it is easy to be disappointed by what it does not offer. Let’s get those factors out of the way right at the beginning, so we can focus on what Warlock does offer. There are not many peacetime options, and peace acts as a chance to prepare for the next bout of fighting. Diplomacy is very poor indeed. Whilst it is possible to form alliances, and a few other diplomatic staples, the AI is generally reluctant to play along. City management is quite lightweight. Terrain has no influence on city production outside of special resource hexes, and impassable hexes like mountains. Terrain is very important when it comes to unit movement and combat calculations, however. Constructing as many cities as possible is the best strategy; there is no equivalent to other game’s happiness or corruption to hold back the sprawl, and no advantage gained from remaining small.

 

If the player is doing particularly well in a war, the AI may sue for peace and sweeten the offer with tribute.

 

What does Warlock do well? Creative, flexible, occasionally deranged warfare. It’s a game where open-minded players will thrive. Magic allows the game to offer additional solutions to age-old strategic questions such as, “How can I break through this choke point?” To answer that question with Warlock‘s toolset, you can:

 

1) Use strong units to assault the choke point head on, grinding your way through in a battle of attrition.

2) Use ranged units and magic attacks to weaken the defending units before sending in your heavies.

3) Use a ship to bombard the enemy from the sea, if terrain permits.

4) Use a teleport spell to send individual units behind enemy lines.

5) Summon units like imps or ghost wolves behind enemy lines

6) Use a spell such as “water walking” or “levitation” to flank and/or bypass the choke point.

7) Use a unit which can naturally fly to flank and/or bypass the choke point.

8) Use debuff spells like “weakness” to reduce the defenders to pitiful shadows of their former selves.

9) If the enemy unit is using a particular damage type, cast defensive spells of the appropriate type to make your unit partially immune to the enemy’s attacks.

10) Use magic to resurrect dead units and send them right back in for another go.

11) Dragons. Nobody likes being burped on by a dragon.

 

That’s quite a range of options! Sometimes the detail is as important as the outline. Yes, you can send in a unit of flying swordsmen. You can also send in a unit of knights riding flying donkeys, or water-walking tophat-wearing werewolves! Hence the aforementioned “occasionally deranged”. Warlock does not always take itself seriously.

 

Some of the special resources are more … special than others.

 

While there are only three playable races, they are well individualised. In addition to having unique graphics, buildings, and units, each race is tailored to utilise – and produce – one of the three main resources more heavily than the others. The undead are geared towards mana, humans gold, and monsters food. In the early game, playing towards these strengths is important. By the mid-game, a diligent player will have captured at least one city of each race. At this point specialisation pays dividends; the racial production bonuses and unit recruitment apply no matter who owns the city. Thus, an undead city owned by humans will still produce more mana, still consume mana instead of food to support its populace, and still have the potential to recruit various types of skeleton warriors. There will, however, be a 20% penalty on resource production if the owner is not of the same race.

 

Unit variety is not as limited as the small number of playable races might imply. In addition to the three playable races, the game features numerous minor races. Enterprising warlocks can recruit units from races including elves, dwarves, dragons, and minotaurs. These units are not casual re-skins of the major races’ units; they have their own building requirements, strengths and weaknesses. As you might expect, you can also summon magical creatures to serve in your army, from ghostly wolves to greater elementals. The hostile “wild” unit spawns feature a diverse array of units. In total, the game offers a very generous range of units. Units acquire experience during combat and over time, and will level up at set amounts. Each time they level up, they can choose one of three perks. The game features a wide range of unit upgrades, such as masterwork armour or enchanted weaponry. There is no limit to how many of these upgrades a unit can possess. Once available, upgrades can be purchased for any eligible unit. Lower tier units can also be upgraded into more advanced forms once the necessary buildings have been constructed. This means three things: units never become obsolete, units become highly personalised, and veteran units become powerhouses.

 

Spell research is quite simple. You begin the game with a set amount of research coming in. To increase it you must build certain city improvements on special resource tiles, e.g. an excavation on some ancient ruins. Research does not increase with city quantity, nor with population growth, gold income, or any of the other genre staples. The game will present 5 spells, each chosen randomly. Select one, research it, and you will be offered another 5. The spells which you passed over last time will remain, and the one you researched will be replaced by a new random selection. This randomness can, on rare occasions, be rather frustrating. Gaps will be left in your repertoire until you have played long enough to perform a lot of research. If you lack a favourite attack or buffing spell, you can usually improvise with another. This is a welcome prompt to player creativity. However, if you lack a more specialised spell, such as the one which allows you to banish curses like the “mana drain” spell, you may need to soldier on under the penalty until the research screen finally offers the correct option.

 

On higher difficulties, the AI is not shy about building a large army.

 

Warlock‘s AI is best described as competent. Unless it finds itself hemmed in by other factions, poor terrain, or very strong wild monsters, it can be relied upon to expand. It’s smart enough to pack its cities in densely but not to the point where it over-crowds, thus ensuring maximum usage of space and making defence easier. On the default difficulty the AI does not seem to recruit large armies; however, it is happy to do so on higher difficulties. It recruits a mixed force, using melee, ranged and magical units. Happily, it uses the units correctly! Warlock will not hide its melee units behind its mages, and will attempt to skirmish its ranged units back to safety whilst shooting. The AI is definitely better on the defensive. It is capable of complex movements such as surrounding an isolated unit, swapping damaged units for fresh ones, and using multiple attacks on a single target. It will gleefully use magic against you, with the area of effect fireball spell being a particular favourite. The AI will always use cities and defensive towers to attack when an enemy unit is within their range. Sadly, the AI fares less well when it goes on the offensive. It fails to send sufficient units to get the job done, trickling in two or three units at a time for the player to kill. It will only send more units when the first wave is dead. It attacks the same locations repeatedly, predictably, futilely. The main problem lies with the AI’s unit selection: it insists on using basic and mid-tier units to the exclusion of all else. It will apply some upgrades and magical buffs to its units, but will not take it as far as the player. This means that in a unit-to-unit comparison the AI is badly out-classed from the mid-game onwards. It doesn’t matter how many units it fields in home defence if the player’s units are killing them in a maximum of three hits, with one or two hits being very much the norm.

 

The game’s stiffer challenge lies in exploring the alternate dimensions. Accessed via set portals, these separate maps are packed with Warlock‘s strongest units. Tempting rewards lure the player in. Certain resources do not exist in the normal world, and can only be found inside these alternate dimensions. Other resources are exceptionally rare in the normal world yet abundant in the alternates. Should a beachhead be established, cities can be built, and this provides a measure of back-up should matters go pear-shaped in the normal world.

 

The game setup screen is confusing at first glance, but the elaborate design manages to keep most of the options on a single screen and eliminates drop-down menus.

 

The interface is clean and easy to get on with. Most important information is available at a glance, and breakdowns of global resource income are accessed via tooltips. Combat predictions are accurate and detailed, although the occasional critical hit sees a unit doing more damage than predicted. Hotkeys are present, if sparse. I do feel that the developers missed an opportunity when it comes to scoring. There isn’t any! It would be nice to gauge the relative strength of each warlock. A Civilization IV-style post-game breakdown would also be appreciated. In a game which places such importance on individual units, it’s a little strange that there’s no way to track how many kills you have made, how many units you have lost, how many kills each unit has, and so on. The lack of a proper in-game encyclopaedia is keenly felt. Right-clicking a unit or spell will bring up a little encyclopaedia entry, complete with stats and lightly comical descriptive blurb. But if you do not have the item available to right-click you have no way to access the entry.

 

Right-clicking on a unit will bring up a detailed information box. Tooltips provide further breakdowns of stats, including resistances, active spell buffs, and unit upgrades.

 

Warlock does not feature a campaign, and currently lacks multiplayer. It does have a fully-featured random game generator. There’s a variety of map sizes and types, and you can control the number of AIs and extra dimensions. If you do not wish to use a pre-set warlock, you can create your own using a small yet significant selection of perks. Sadly, it is not possible to tinker with advanced settings, such as wild monster spawn frequency, starting resources, or available victory conditions. The map generator does throw out the occasional nasty starting position. Some players may enjoy this as a challenge; others will want to re-roll. Replay value is moderate to high.

 

Warlock: Master of the Arcane is a game which set out to meet specific goals, and it has succeeded in that. Within its narrow focus, it offers a generous toolkit and gives the player room to experiment. It is not a game for everyone. Peaceniks need not apply! Other strategy gamers should at least download the demo and search for the fabled cheese caves.

 

We hope you enjoyed this post! To quickly find this post, and our other reviews, click the “reviews” tab at the top of this page.

 

Resources

 

Beginners’guide

 

The basis of my review

 

Length of time spent with the game: 4 completed games, approx 38 hours of play (including time spent with the demo).

 

What I have played: Normal and challenging difficulties; small, normal and large map sizes; continents and super-continent map types.

 

What I have not played: Impossible difficulty, and those rated below normal; two remaining map types; the largest map size.

 

Rachel McFadden (aka frogbeastegg) has been gaming since she discovered the original Prince of Persia on the IBM 286sx PC. Whilst strategy and RPGs are her preferred genres, she is a multiplatform gamer who will play almost anything provided it isn’t sport, car racing, or multiplayer only. Under the frogbeastegg name Rachel has written guides for many of the Total War series, various AARs for strategy games, and a few pieces of fiction. When not engaged in reminding various virtual populaces that she is in fact the Supreme Ruler of the Universe and the One True Hero, Rachel can typically be found with her nose in a book.

 

Note: the above comments are based on a review copy supplied by the game’s publisher, Paradox Interactive.

X-Com 1.5? Xenonauts Alpha Preview

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This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Xenonauts

I’ve previously written about Xenonauts, the indie strategy game inspired by UFO: Enemy Unknown/X-Com: UFO Defence. Developer Goldhawk Interactive has taken pre-orders for a long time, but now it’s launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise US$50,000, and released a public, alpha demo of the game. Is it worth your attention?

 

After spending some time with a preview build (a recent predecessor of the public demo), I can say this: as promised, Xenonauts is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Its concept, mechanics, and feel are straight out of the original game; however, Goldhawk’s clear intent is to make it more user-friendly; iron out some of the original’s annoyances; cut down on busywork and no-brainer decisions, and replace them with interesting choices. Here are the details of what I saw:

 

Geoscape (world map)

 

The Xenonauts’ base: Earth’s last, best hope

 

  • As with the original X-Com, your first sight of the game will be its world map – black, stark and crisp, but still recognisably the good old Geoscape. Zooming down to an individual base reveals management has been tidied up. One general store will now hold all your goods. Conventional Earth weapons are now available in unlimited supply – not only does this make sense thematically, it cuts down on the workload at the start of the game. Unusable loot (e.g. duplicates of a widget you’ve already researched) is automatically sold or destroyed. Soldiers’ stats – and their encumbrance! – are now visible on the inventory screen. All in all, the emphasis here seems clearly on reducing tedious maintenance in between the good parts.

 

  • Air battles are much more involved than in the original game. Instead of hitting one button to engage, your aircraft and the UFOs now manoeuvre in pausable real-time – a little like a real-time Steambirds. And unlike the original game, where two air-to-air weapons were hands-down optimal (Avalanche missiles at the start of the game, then plasma beams once they became available), Xenonauts’ air combat is closer to rock-paper-scissors. You now have two fighters available early on, and each fills a different role: F-17 Condors armed with cannon and light missiles are good against small, agile UFOs, while lumbering MiG-32s with Avalanche torpedoes are good against bigger foes. So far this is a nice change, though it’s possible it could eventually become repetitive.

 

Air combat

 

Ground battles

  • Xenonauts’ clean UI and aesthetic are also evident in its battles. There are fewer buttons to worry about; the art style is simple but clear; and a faint dark outline helps you pick out soldiers and aliens. The controls feel like Jagged Alliance 2’s: left-clicking on a destination square will show a soldier’s projected path and how many APs will remain; right-clicking on a target determines how long a soldier will aim his shot; burst fire is toggled by hitting a button. Unsurprisingly, this is a big improvement over the original.

 

The Xenonauts (bottom left) prepare to engage an alien (top right)

 

  • The “interesting choices” extend to your soldiers’ weapons, which feel nicely differentiated. Take the small arms. Assault rifles are jacks of all trade, masters of none. Shotguns are hideously short-ranged, but take relatively few action points to shoot, meaning a Xenonaut can still fire after moving long distances. At this stage, however, it looks like the squad’s real killing power is in its support weapons. These are heavy, take an accuracy penalty if their bearer moves and shoots in the same turn – and hit like a ton of bricks. Machine guns can unleash whole volleys at a time. Even unaimed, precision rifles take plenty of AP to fire, but investing just a few more APs pushes their accuracy into the stratosphere. And rocket launchers, just as they did in the original, will level anything near their target.

 

All in all, if the early game is any indication, Goldhawk knows what it’s doing at the design level.  It has plenty of work yet to do, and it’s too soon to tell how balance, pacing, and the other ingredients of “fun” will eventually come together. However, if Goldhawk can (A) sustain the quality of its ideas through the mid-to-late game; and (B) get the nuts and bolts right, this would bode very well for the final product. In the meantime, yes, Xenonauts is definitely worth your attention.

 

Resources

 

Public alpha demo, mirror, and official torrent.

Xenonauts’ Kickstarter page.

Official website.

 

Note: the above comments were based on a preview build supplied by the game’s developer, Goldhawk Interactive.

Stacking – The Verdict

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This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Stacking
A journey with dolls

 

Double Fine Productions’ adventure game, Stacking, has an illustrious pedigree: Double Fine founder Tim Schafer’s resume is littered with genre pillars, from Monkey Island to Grim Fandango. Born out of an internal Double Fine game jam, Stacking debuted on consoles in 2011, and has now reached the PC. How does it stack (sorry) up? Pretty well, thanks to two distinct strengths.

 

The first is its original premise: the residents of Stacking’s world aren’t humans, they’re Russian matryoshka dolls. Your character is the tiniest of all, but “stacking” into a small doll will allow you to jump into a medium-sized doll, which will allow you to jump into a large doll, and so on. Each doll has its own ability, which you can use while stacked into it. As such, instead of the usual “fiddling with every item in your inventory”, solving puzzles is a matter of working out which doll’s power to use – or, sometimes, which dolls’ powers, as some puzzles require the combined use of more than one. (Using multiple dolls is Stacking’s equivalent of “use every item with every other item”, but thankfully, the puzzles are more sensibly designed than that!) It’s fresh, it’s quirky, and at first, it’s a delight to stack into every doll in sight, in search of the next new ability.

 

Yes, you can stack into all those bicyclists

 

The second is how neatly it avoids the traditional sin of adventure games: the ease of getting stuck. Normally, adventure game puzzles have one solution, and if you can’t guess it, tough luck (short of resorting to GameFAQs). This is especially bad when the game expects you to, say, make a moustache out of cat hair. While Stacking does offer an in-game hint system, it also addresses the root of the problem: in this game, puzzles have anywhere from three to five solutions. One or two will usually be obvious… but the challenge comes from trying to work out the rest. This is a much better way of designing an adventure game: it lets you set your own pace (do I want to blast through, or tick off every solution?) and gives a good reason to be completionist (some of the solutions are laugh-out-loud funny).

 

Stacking’s greatest limitation is that its characters and plot aren’t very deep – not deep enough to carry the game. Without the compelling stories of, say, The Longest Journey or Gabriel Knight, Stacking relies on novelty value. And eventually, the novelty wears off: by the time I finished, I found the game less amusing and enjoyable than when I began. (I also stopped bothering with every solution: I just wanted to wrap up!) But Stacking is short enough for this not to be a serious problem – I finished it in ~8 hours, before it outstayed its welcome.

 

At the  end of the day, Stacking isn’t a great game, but it is a good one: the video game equivalent of a healthy snack. Cute, imaginative, and sometimes hilarious, it’s especially well suited for quick breaks – if you’re tired or short on time, you can dip in, solve a puzzle or two, and call it a day. Worth a look for genre fans.

 

You can buy Stacking (PC) from Amazon US.

 

We hope you enjoyed this post! To quickly find this post, and our other reviews, click the “reviews” tab at the top of this page.

 

The basis of my review

 

Time spent with the game: Around 8 hours.

 

What I have played: The main game.

 

What I haven’t played: The DLC adventure (“The Lost Hobo King”) included free with the PC version.

On the importance of swooshing cameras (or, personal meanderings how minor details add up to significant effect)

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This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series Crusader Kings II game diary, by Rachel McFadden

Europa Universalis II was my first Paradox game. Since then I’ve played every strategy title Paradox has produced, excepting the Hearts of Iron series. Whilst I have great respect for their scope and ambition, and do not care to think about how many hours of my life they have consumed, I have often found them rather soulless. Not quite the proverbial Excel spreadsheet – but not all that far off. They lacked atmosphere and felt like they had little to do with the era they portrayed outside of a handful of specific game mechanics and some window dressing. After a lengthy process of gradual improvement, I find that Crusader Kings II demonstrates that Paradox has put the final nail in that soulless feeling’s coffin.

 

How have the developers managed this? With a swooshing camera, trivial artwork, nicely timed music, and a few other entirely frivolous details which, taken together, add up most pleasingly.

 

When Crusader Kings II launches, it greets the player with a stained-glass version of the Paradox company logo. This is not unusual: the other games all feature a customised version of the logo. The intro music begins to play immediately, a gentle piece with soft chanting over the top of a small selection of instruments. If you do not own the game, you can listen to the title music here. The logo swaps to a slideshow of unique illustrations. After 52 seconds, the point where the game will transition to main menu on most computers, the music begins to pick up both in pace and in complexity. At 1:03, bam! The music temporarily kicks up another level as the player surveys their options, then goes softer to permit undistracted thought. At 2:06, around the time I’m seriously pondering the merits of a particular dynasty, the music kicks up to full fever and my head fills with visions of epic conquest. Whether the harmony of game timing and music pace is intentional or a happy accident, the sequence does possess a few advantages over Paradox’s prior games. The two immediately prior handily demonstrate two different approaches, neither of which I feel works as well. Sengoku observes total silence through the loading screens; music makes its first appearance when the player arrives at the main menu. A House Divided, the expansion pack for Victoria II, has an animated intro sequence prior to the loading screens. Whilst this works nicely on the player’s first game, on all subsequent ones it is skipped. This results in a burst of disassociated music before the video vanishes and the majestic loading screen music begins. Compared to Crusader Kings II’s smooth sequence, the result feels uneven and disrupted.

 

Crusader Kings II has another trick up its sleeve for the opening: my titular swooshy camera. The main menu is a 3D map of Christendom plus neighbouring non-Christian lands. Click on ‘single player’ and swoosh! The camera swings in, seamlessly transitioning the map from background to the centrepiece on which you choose your dynasty. Choose your dynasty and start the game, and swoosh! Once again, a seamless transition as the map zooms in on your starting location, the interface swaps to the in-game set, and the game is ready to play. As Nintendo 64 owners used to tell their Playstation ‘rivals’ during the fifth-generation console wars, smooth transitions and no loading times matter. In this instance they preserve the atmosphere the game creates, and allow for one very neat visual effect. The swoosh itself, despite being a tiny bit of programming, makes the game feel more luxurious than previous Paradox titles. It feels like a Big Boy Studio effect.

 

The swooshy camera also reveals an overt secret. When the camera begins its first swoop, you can see the boundaries of the 3D world. Rather than cutting off in an ugly crop, there is a raised, patterned wooden border. The world exists as a sculpture inside a tray. Who would possess such a map? How about the fabled Emperor Qin, whose tomb is said to possess a map of China with rivers made out of mercury. Plush! Crusader Kings II is not the first game to present its map as precisely that. Victoria II mimicked a school atlas when the player zoomed out far enough, and CA’s original Shogun: Total War plays out on a parchment map with carved wooden counters, to name but two. That said, the effect is unusual, and presented in a manner which feels distinct to this one game.

 

 

What about the sound effects? Where most games feature bland clicking sounds when you hit this or that interface button, Crusader Kings II features various harp chords. Move around quickly enough and you create your own little tune. This only applies to the ‘choose your dynasty’ screen, so it does not have the chance to wear out its welcome.

 

That’s the swooshy camerawork and the well-timed music. What about the rest?

 

As a casual glance at any screenshot will reveal, the game’s interface is a concoction of stained-glass, occasional gilding, muted colours, and niello. In-game, you will notice a multitude of little details, like sections of scrollwork carving. The stained-glass buttons are made up of numerous little panes, not crude chunks of colour. Messages are presented on scraps of tattered parchment. There’s a large variety of custom paintings used across the interface, from the reclining lady in the pregnancy announcement to the soldiers on the battle screen. This is an image-rich game. I cannot think of any other Paradox game with as many supporting artworks. In this aspect Crusader Kings II is once again the culmination of a slow process; each Paradox game has added a little more care to the UI artwork, passing from the functional ugliness of the early games, through the passable but bland games like Victoria, to the almost-but-not-quite of Sengoku‘s tasteful wooden panelling.

 

Having given a nod to the most obvious, I’d like to move to the minor detail I myself find most important: armies. In prior games, armies tended to look very similar, to the point where I occasionally found it difficult to tell who owned what! Crusader Kings II gives each province’s army its own unique coat of arms, and an army levied from that province will wear the coat of arms on its surcoat. Additionally, different cultures have different army models. Instantly, the world feels far more alive, the game more detailed. Now that sounds confusing in the opposite direction. How do you tell which army belongs to whom? Answer: it’s easy to recognise the coats of arms, yours and your foes’, because you see them all the time whilst playing the game. Heraldry works – that’s why it was used for so many centuries. If that’s not enough, the owning faction’s icon appears below the army model, and it’s that vital bit bigger and clearer than similar identifiers in games like Sengoku, whilst not so disassociated as the big flags in games like Europa Universalis III.

 

Armies in Sengoku. Two warring clans ... but which one is mine?

 

Armies in CK2. Look-it the purdy surcoats!

 

The characters speak for themselves. Instead of being filled with rather bland countries differentiated only by their flag, Crusader Kings II has a world filled with varied faces, traits and statistics. This is the evolution of a design which began in Crusader Kings I, then grew in Europa Universalis: Rome and Sengoku. Whilst the range of character stats and actions is a little larger, it is once again the seemingly unnecessary frippery which helps Crusader Kings II take that leap ahead. Due to a wider range of character portraits, improved visual detail on those portraits, and a better visual aging process, the game feels that bit more convincing. That in turn supports the character-based gameplay, with all its inter-personal relationships and event choices. In a satisfying loop, that gameplay bolsters the portraits by making the faces feel like more than a randomised bit of art.

 

A swooshy camera, lots of minor graphical frippery, a few frivolous details – all unnecessary fanciness with little relation to gameplay… all vital to making Crusader Kings II feel alive.

 

Rachel McFadden (aka frogbeastegg) has been gaming since she discovered the original Prince of Persia on the IBM 286sx PC. Whilst strategy and RPGs are her preferred genres, she is a multiplatform gamer who will play almost anything provided it isn’t sport, car racing, or multiplayer only. Under the frogbeastegg name Rachel has written guides for many of the Total War series, various AARs for strategy games, and a few pieces of fiction. When not engaged in reminding various virtual populaces that she is in fact the Supreme Ruler of the Universe and the One True Hero, Rachel can typically be found with her nose in a book.

 

Note: the above comments are based on a review copy supplied by the game’s developer, Paradox Interactive.

Matchlocks for my Eyes, or Total War: Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai – The Verdict

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This entry is part 7 of 10 in the series Total War: Shogun 2
The Fall of the Samurai

 

Set during the sixteenth-century zenith of the samurai, Creative Assembly’s Total War: Shogun 2 (2011) was one of the best strategy game in years. CA soon followed it up with a first expansion, Rise of the Samurai¸ which wound the clock back to the Gempei War of the twelfth century. Now the latest, stand-alone expansion, Fall of the Samurai, wraps up almost a millennium of Japanese civil strife by moving forward to the nineteenth-century Boshin War. How does it compare to its illustrious parent?

 

The promise

 

Fall’s greatest strength is the clarity of its theme: this is a game about change, in a way that no other Total War game has been. In fifty years, Japan went from a land of shogun and samurai to a power that could beat a Western empire; and from look to feel to mechanics, that wrenching transformation is written all over Fall.

 

You’ll notice the game’s new aesthetic straight away: riflemen face samurai in the game’s loading screens, the new map looks like a nineteenth-century atlas rather than a Japanese scroll, most of the playable daimyo are dressed in Western uniforms.  As you build up your empire, you’ll see more wonderful touches in the graphics and flavour text. Trains puff smoke and chug through little tunnels. Generals receive stat boosts by picking up Western knick-knacks: pianos, penny-dreadfuls  and more. New technologies are accompanied by poetic blurbs, running the gamut from bleak to resigned to hopeful. (Compare the descriptions for six techs: “arms deals”, “modern army”, “cordial relations”, “gold standard”, “capitalist production”, and “charter oath”.)

 

But text is only part of the story. Gameplay mechanics are another vital way to communicate theme, and this is where Fall shines. As you fight your way across Japan, you’ll witness the end of an era, or more precisely, the transition through several eras, compressed into a single frantic period. Within the span of a single campaign, you’ll go from the shock-dominated battlefield of the Middle Ages, through the pike-and-shot era, to the fire-dominated age of industrial war. At the start of the game, samurai and even levy spearmen will roll right over peasant musketeers, but soon enough, trained soldiers with modern rifles will take their toll on anyone who approaches on foot. As firearms get better and better, riflemen more and more skilful, and artillery more abundant, modern armies will eventually massacre hordes of samurai or peasants with barely a scratch.

 

A bang, not a whimper: the power of modern weaponry

 

As such, modern weaponry is a literal game-changer. But not just due to its lethality. Riflemen do what bowmen have always done in the Total War games, just much, much better. Even greater transformations are visible in the other arms, cavalry and artillery, and what they do to the overall feel of combat. Traditionally, battles in the Total War series were about pinning the enemy’s infantry in melee with your own, preferably heavier infantry, then swinging around with cavalry to roll up the enemy from behind. Heavy infantry beat spearmen, spearmen beat cavalry, and cavalry beat anything if it attacked from behind. Even in the gunpowder-era games (Empire and Napoleon: Total War), battles were decided after the armies were close enough to see the whites of each other’s eyes. Not so in Fall. Spearmen still counter cavalry if they catch them in hand-to-hand… but now the cavalry have guns aplenty, and they need them. The best counter to a charging lancer is no longer a man with a pike; it’s another horseman with a gun, or perhaps even a well-trained rifleman. And woe betide the spearman who tries chasing a revolver-armed horseman. That is, if that spearman survives artillery that long. The inaccurate cannon of Empire and Napoleon are gone: American Civil War-era Parrott guns unlock early on, and they will rack up hundreds of kills per battle. Massed Parrotts will knock out even elite regiments long before they enter the fray, and later artillery is even more lethal. You will see the death of chivalry in this game, and you will see the road towards the slaughter of the Great War.

 

The failings

 

At their best, Fall’s battles might just be the finest in the entire series. The key phrase is “at their best”. All too often, the battles are not at their best, due to problems with the campaign AI. And that sums up Fall’s greatest weakness: it all too rarely fires on every cylinder. Here are some examples:

 

1. Land combat. Battles at the start of the game, when both the player and the AI rely on levies backed by a handful of samurai and modern riflemen, are tense and fun. The problems come later: the computer just doesn’t understand how badly quality eventually beats quantity. Even in the endgame, I’ve only seen the AI use high-end modern infantry once. I see rather more regular modern infantry (especially after installing an AI mod), but I also see lots of samurai and peasants  – by this stage, target practice. All too often, the game serves up fodder instead of challenge.

 

This becomes repetitive after a while

 

2. Sea combat. The war at sea is meant to take a similar course to the war on land. Wooden ships burn en masse once explosive shells show up, and ironclads sound their final death knell. Pitched fleet battles, especially in the presence of coastal defences, can be spectacular. Unfortunately, the designers evidently thought it was fun to make the player play whack-a-mole against constant, small raiding fleets (especially on “Hard” difficulty). It’s not. The problem is exacerbated by naval zones of control that are too small; and puny coastal defences. I alleviated this with a homebrew naval mod, but I shouldn’t have to fix games myself.

 

Wooden ships: all too vulnerable

 

3. Diplomacy. In the base game, diplomacy was “every man for himself”, but Fall divides Japan into two broad camps (based on the way religion worked in the original game): pro-Imperial and pro-Shogunate. Players of the same allegiance enjoy a healthy bonus to diplomacy; players of opposing allegiances take a serious penalty. The victory conditions reflect this: your camp has to take X number of provinces and both Edo and Kyoto, but you personally have to take far fewer provinces (14 in the short campaign, rather than the base game’s 25). And rather than “you vs the world”, realm divide now functions as the final Shogunate/Imperial showdown: only the opposing camp will attack you, while clans of the same allegiance will rally behind you instead.

 

On paper, this is a great idea. And when it works (i.e. when the war between the two factions hangs in the balance), it works well. It’s very cool to be part of, as opposed to the focus of, a greater conflict – especially after realm divide. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work: the course of the broader war is a crapshoot. If your faction does too well, the game is boringly easy. If your faction does too badly, then the game turns into a grinding slog. It’s aggravating when such a key part of the overall experience comes down to luck of the draw.

 

4. Difficulty and balance. More broadly, Fall’s campaign feels as though the developers didn’t have the time to properly tune the game’s balance. It shows up in the difficulty settings: on “Normal”, the campaign is often rather easy. “Hard” is a different story, but not because the computer is cleverer. No: everything costs roughly 15%-20% more, and the computer players team up for a game of kick-the-human. It shows in the victory conditions: requiring that your camp hold Edo and Kyoto might be historically accurate, but it skews the game, since both (particularly Edo) are within Shogunate territory. As a result, my Normal Shogunate campaign felt much shorter and more anticlimactic than my Imperialist campaigns. (Compare the base game, in which you fought your way towards Kyoto, in the centre of the map.) It shows in the game’s economy. The developers clearly intended money to be scarcer: trade nodes have been removed, most farmland is poorer than in the base game, and everything costs more. But they went too far: now money is artificially, annoyingly scarce unless you beeline for “fertile” and “very fertile” lands (especially bad on “Hard”). And it shows in the issues I described above. Given time, surely the developers would have fixed the AI issues, the ship spam, and so forth.

 

As such, my playthroughs of Fall have been a decidedly mixed bag. Playing on “Hard”, my campaigns began promisingly, with plenty of challenge and thrills, before eventually degenerating into frustration. Playing on “Normal”, one game I spent fighting small, weak clans was dead boring. One game in which the opposing faction took over most of Japan started well, but turned into a slogfest. And my final, most rewarding playthrough delivered the experience that Fall should have been from the start. I played differently that last time – by then I knew the “optimal” path to take, and I didn’t turtle (which I think helped the game’s pacing). But I also had to apply the AI and naval mods mentioned above, and I benefited from luck (e.g. with the progress of the Imperial/Shogunate war).

 

Conclusions

 

The Twilight Samurai

 

Ultimately, Fall of the Samurai didn’t live up to my hopes. Fall brings together theme and mechanics with a superb battle system, only to hamstring itself with a wildly inconsistent campaign. Its highs are higher than the base game’s – but its lows are just too frequent, and too annoying, for it to fill its predecessor’s shoes.

 

At the end of the day, I have to formulate my recommendation based on one wonderful campaign –and five (!) that were love-hate. And that is: wait for patches, mods, and/or a bargain sale. Buy Fall of the Samurai then. But don’t buy it now.

 

You can buy Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai from Amazon (US).

 

We hope you enjoyed this post! To quickly find this post, and our other reviews, click the “reviews” tab at the top of this page.

 

Resources

 

Province fertility/specialty map, updated for Fall of the Samurai.

 

Radious’ AI mod. It’s hard to unpick the difference made by a mod, but I do think this helped the AI recruit better armies.

 

My homebrew naval mod. To install, simply unzip and place in the \data folder in the game’s Steam directory. Its key features are:

 

  1. Bombardment range is still 8 (or 10 for Tosa, which gets a +2 bonus).
  2. The Tier 1 harbour (“If this is a port, then one wall is a house!”) remains defenceless.
  3. The Tier 2 port now has level 1 defences (equal to the base game’s trade ports) with a range of 12. The defences are silenced at 70% health.
  4. The Tier 3 trade port now has level 2 defences (equal to the base game’s military ports) with a range of 12. The defences are silenced at 50% health (again, equal to the base game’s military ports).
  5. Tier 3 military ports and the foreign (British/French/American) tier 4 trade ports now have Level 3 defences (equal to the base game’s drydocks), with a range of 12. The defences are silenced at 30% (again, equal to drydocks).
  6. Drydocks, whose defences were already maxed out, have received no boost.
  7. The naval intercept radius is now 12.
  8. These changes will be reflected in the tooltips when you mouse over the buildings, but not in the in-game encyclopaedia.

 

The basis of my review

 

Time spent with the game: I estimate at least 20 or 30 hours.

 

What I have played: Two campaigns won (Nagaoka/Normal/Short, Tosa/Normal/Short). Four campaigns aborted: two as Nagaoka/Hard, one as Tosa/Hard, and one as Tosa/Normal. Briefly, the cooperative multiplayer campaign (Choshu/Hard, with a friend playing Tosa). A couple of multiplayer battles.

 

What I haven’t played: The PvP multiplayer campaign.

Wargame: European Escalation – 40% off sale & content patch

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This entry is part 4 of 12 in the series Wargame: European Escalation/AirLand Battle/Red Dragon

Eugen Systems has released a new content patch for Wargame: European Escalation (officially a “free DLC” – the only practical difference is that you’ll have to download it separately), while for the weekend, Amazon and Steam are now selling the game for US$24, representing a 40% discount. Reader Wolfox wonders whether the game is worth it, for an offline gamer, at that price.

 

My answer is “probably”. At a design level, Wargame is fantastic, and the new patch has fixed two issues that had marred player-vs-AI games. You can now do comp stomps, and you can now unlock new units by playing the skirmish mode or comp stomps (albeit more slowly than through PvP). The skirmish AI still offers less challenge than an experienced human player, but it plays well enough to make me work for victory. (Think one of the better Total War games, or, well, most strategy games.) And there’s a fun way to enhance the challenge – play with a themed deck, e.g. by restricting yourself to units of just one nationality.

 

Meanwhile, my recommendation for the game’s target audience (folks who enjoy PvP multiplayer) hasn’t changed. Wargame was worth it at full price, and it’s definitely worth it at 40% off!

 

Going forward, I’d still like to see more options to handicap the game or customise victory conditions. However, Eugen’s track record (in addition to the above additions, it’s patched in a new gameplay mode, more maps, and continued balance tweaks) makes it very plausible that we’ll see future additions along these lines. Keep up the good work, Eugen!

Postcard from a world of Russian dolls

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This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Stacking

Stacking, Double Fine’s Russian doll-themed adventure game, is a treat for the eyes as well as the funny bone. In the above screenshot, a mismatched crowd queues up for tickets at a train station; their distinct designs, and the station’s warm ambience, speak to the love and craft with which this game was made.

 

Stay tuned for a full review once I’ve finished!

Wargame: European Escalation – The Verdict

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This entry is part 3 of 12 in the series Wargame: European Escalation/AirLand Battle/Red Dragon
This British Chieftain tank destroyed 8 enemy tanks, 3 armoured cars, a jeep, a personnel carrier, and a helicopter. Give the crew a VC!

 

Summing up Wargame: European Escalation, Eugen Systems’ latest real-time strategy game, is easy. It’s designed to do two things: evoke the modern (1970s-1980s) battlefield, and give the player choice. Picking it up is easy. But mastering it – that’s hard.

 

Playing Wargame is about putting the right troops in the right place at the right time. Unlike Eugen’s earlier RUSE, there is no base-building and almost no economic management – more dangerous parts of the map are worth more reinforcement points, that’s it. Instead, tactics are king. The basics are simple: use recon units to size up the foe; recognise that in an equal fight, the defenders will win; attack where the odds are unequal in your favour; and defend or fall back where they’re not. The tricky part is the “how”.  With 361 units in the game, who are the right troops for a given situation? On large maps, laden with forests and swamps, highways and towns, where is the right place to attack, hold, lay an ambush? On battlefields this fluid and lethal, when is the right time to act?

 

And that is the beauty of Wargame. From a thematic perspective, while the game is a long way from a realistic simulation, it borrows enough to feel believable (think Total War or Panzer General). Simply but clearly, Wargame illustrates the importance of scouting, flanks, supply lines, terrain, and more. Its huge arsenal helps bring the setting to life – it’s addictive to compare an Abrams to a Leopard 2 to a Challenger, or a Marder to a Bradley to a BMP!  From a mechanical perspective, it epitomises Sid Meier’s definition of a strategy game as a “series of interesting choices”, beginning with which units to unlock and which of those unlocked to take into battle; and culminating in the myriad of decisions made during a match.

 

The right unit, in the right place, at the right time: Flamethrowers at point-blank range

 

Unfortunately, the game’s single-player campaign can’t do justice to its design. I’m not convinced that linear campaigns and scripted missions fit a game built around choice, and while I did get past the introductory campaign (5 missions out of 22), the next mission I tried prompted me to abandon this mode out of frustration*. I think enjoying the campaign would require a taste for scripted (and difficult!) RTS levels, one which I don’t share. The game’s skirmish mode is much better suited to its design, and decently implemented: I can beat the computer player almost every time, but barring the odd off day, it’s usually good enough to give me an exciting fight. The bigger problems with skirmish are a lack of customisation options and a failure to tie into the metagame: skirmish is limited to 1v1 matches (in a game where most maps are intended for >2 players), you can’t save skirmish replays, and you can’t unlock new units by playing this mode. (Update: Eugen has now added a comp stomp mode to Wargame, and you can now unlock new units via skirmish, albeit more slowly than via the campaign or PvP multiplayer.) As such, I would love to see a expansion that added a dynamic campaign, a la Dawn of War: Dark Crusade or Rise of Nations. It’s in multiplayer where Wargame really shines.

 

(A couple of quick notes about multiplayer. The community is mostly civil – I think Wargame benefits from not being the kind of title that draws the ‘l2p nub’ crowd. And while forum discussions are filled with complaints about unit balance, exploits, and immersion-breaking tactics, my actual experience could not have been more different: 95% of my matches have featured well-rounded armies deployed in reasonable ways. I have no doubt that exploits exist, but Eugen’s track record makes me confident it’ll patch the remaining holes.)

 

Lastly, I should warn that Wargame’s plethora of units has a downside: I’m sure it would steepen the learning curve for players new to the period. The game’s manual provides brief descriptions of each category of unit, and detailed stats are available in-game. However, short of poring over those, there is precious little guidance as to which tool to use for which job. How would a Leopard 1 fare against that T-80 coming down the road? (Badly.) Is the Challenger or the Chieftain the high-end British tank? (The Challenger.) What’s the difference between the Dragon and TOW anti-tank missiles?  (The Dragon is carried by infantry, the more powerful TOW is carried by vehicles.) While surmountable, this could well be an early stumbling block.

 

Driving into the sunset

 

At the end of the day, Wargame won’t be all things to all players. For someone who isn’t interested in the period, an offline gamer, or both, my advice would be to wait for a demo, a sale, or perhaps new features in a patch – the campaign is just too taste-dependent, while skirmish is a bit limited. (Update: The new features have come, and Eugen has added comp stomps, which should enhance Wargame’s appeal to non-PvPers.) But for a gamer who is interested in Wargame’s subject – say, someone who grew up playing Gunship 2000 and M1 Tank Platoon, or reading books such as Nato and the Defence of the West, Red Storm Rising and Jane’s Modern Tanks – and who enjoys multiplayer, this will be a dream come true. Highly recommended to the latter, and a candidate for Game of the Year.

 

* This mission placed me in command of an American force stuck behind enemy lines, low on fuel and ammo, and reliant on captured Soviet supply depots. Very cool concept, but wearyingly implemented.

 

You can buy Wargame: European Escalation from, amongst other vendors, Amazon US and Gamersgate.

 

We hope you enjoyed this post! To quickly find this post, and our other reviews, click the “reviews” tab at the top of this page.

 

Resources

 

Fan wiki

 

The basis of my review

 

Time spent with the game: I estimate 20-25 hours. Steam says almost 50 hours, but this includes a lot of time away from the computer. Meanwhile, the game’s figure of 18-plus hours seems to underestimate time spent in single-player,  checking unit stats, etc.

 

What I have played:  A lot of unranked multiplayer games (mostly team games – 2v2, 3v 3, 4v4), one ranked 1v1 multiplayer battle, a fair number of skirmish games, the first campaign (5 campaign missions out of 22 total). This has mostly been as Nato.

 

What I haven’t played: The remaining campaign missions; the Warsaw Pact (much).

Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai first impressions

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This entry is part 6 of 10 in the series Total War: Shogun 2
"The Battle of Hakodate", c. 1880. Artist unknown. Courtesy Wikipedia.

 

Note: my final review can be found here.

 

With its promise of firearms, ironclads, and railroads, I was eager to leap into Fall of the Samurai, the nineteenth century-themed expansion to Shogun 2. After getting ~70-80 turns (up to 1867) in my abortive first campaign on “hard” difficulty, starting a second hard campaign, and then reaching the mid/late game (1866) of a third campaign on “normal” (all three times as the Nagaoka clan), here are my early thoughts:

 

I like the balance between firearm and traditional units. At first, cheap spear levies should remain the core of any army – early muskets are inaccurate and slow-firing, which makes levy musketeers better suited to manning fortress walls than to the open field. However, it doesn’t take long (~12 turns) to unlock modern rifles, which shoot much faster and more accurately than the muskets. Train up a decent force of riflemen (again, this doesn’t take long; they’re not too expensive, and they only take a single turn to recruit), and you can safely relegate the spearmen to anti-cavalry support or castle wall fodder. And not only does better technology unlock new units, it also grants bonuses to the basic ones, so those basic riflemen remain useful later on. In my first game, it was a delight to give a whole army of charging samurai a lesson in modern warfare.

 

Fortress assaults are even more lethal, due to the ubiquity of guns. Against well-defended castles, artillery seems to be essential.

 

I have yet to get the hang of naval warfare. Unlike Empire and Napoleon: Total War, all the ships are steam-powered, so the wind doesn’t play as big a role as it did in those games. For now, it seems to be a matter of bringing the most (and the most technologically advanced) cannon, engaging broadside to broadside, and praying one of your ships doesn’t blow up to a lucky hit. I have not yet unlocked the high-end naval units (ironclads and torpedo boats), so these might shake up the equation.

 

Naval bombardments are cool without unbalancing the game. If a land battle takes place near a friendly fleet, you can call in up to two barrages. While powerful, they have a very long cooldown and aren’t especially precise, so navies aren’t the “I win” button.

 

Money is harder to come by. There are no more trade nodes, so to obtain goods for export (silk, tea, etc), you have to seize the provinces where they’re produced. As such, resource-producing provinces are now far more valuable than in the base game. This is even more pronounced when playing on “hard” difficulty, in which everything is more expensive.

 

On “hard”, the AI loves to dogpile you – especially if you’re at war with its allies. You do get significant diplomatic bonuses with clans that share your allegiance (pro-shogun or pro-imperial), but that, by itself, is no guarantee of your safety. In this regard, Fall feels similar to the previous expansion pack, Rise of the Samurai.

 

The in-battle voices have deteriorated. No more Japanese voice acting from your units, no more “yari ashigaru de gozaimasu!”, and no more advisor yelling, “shameful display!” Instead units acknowledge orders in accented English a la Rome: Total War, and the battle commentary now comes from a hammy, booming-voiced, all-American sort (“The enemies’ allies run like he-eathens from a preacher, sir!”). I liked things better in the original. Still, this is a relatively minor problem for me.

 

The “hard” difficulty setting lives up to its name – after a while, I found it more frustrating than fun. “Hard equates to more demands on less money (costlier buildings + more enemy armies to fight), and the overall difficulty is closer to Rise of the Samurai than to the base game. Unless you’re a lot better than me at Shogun 2, I don’t recommend Hard for your first game.

 

Meanwhile, “normal” turned out to be pretty easy once I  hit the midgame. It would be nice if there were a difficulty setting in between. (Of course, realm divide could shake me out of my complacency!)

 

Apart from the difficulty, though, so far so good. I missed Empire’s gunpowder warfare, and I’m glad to see it back in Shogun’s more polished form. Watch this space for more!

 

UPDATE: So as of late 1867, I can state that on “normal”, the short campaign is quick enough to finish in a single day. I haven’t finished… yet. But I’m two provinces away from fulfilling the victory condition (14 provinces, plus Kyoto and Edo in the hands of Shogunate-aligned clans), and standing on the cusp of realm divide. I could easily have won the game any time in the last hour and a half; I’ve just been holding off so I can unlock the endgame units (Gatling guns!).

 

UPDATE 2:  Went back to an earlier save and won the campaign, on “normal”, in one day! Hurray!

 

UPDATE 3: Reflecting on my campaigns as Nagaoka, I feel disappointed with Fall. While as noted above, I really like Fall‘s basic building blocks, the difficulty and pacing have prevented my early experiences from becoming the sum of their parts. I’ve described above my problems with the “hard” campaign, and “normal” turned into a pushover once I got past the early game — all the nearby clans were either friendly, too small to be a threat, or both. And since I was playing the short campaign, realm divide wasn’t a serious danger: this only kicked in after I took 13 provinces, and only needed one province more to win! (The victory thresholds, at 14 provinces for the short campaign and 26 for the long, are far lower than for the base game.) However, I’m willing to give Fall another chance: it’s possible I was (A) unlucky*, (B) playing a less fun faction, (C) unwise to play a short campaign, (D) not experienced enough for my first, “hard” campaign (when I was still learning how Fall worked) and too experienced for the later, “normal” campaign, or (E) some/all of the above. I look forward to reporting back once I’ve tried another campaign.

Attack, defence, and the art of Wargame

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This entry is part 2 of 12 in the series Wargame: European Escalation/AirLand Battle/Red Dragon
I wish I were as good as this guy: Zhuge Liang, the original strategist

It’s pretty clichéd to describe inventions – military, cybersecurity, maybe even medicine – as a race between offence and defence: I invent a weapon, you invent armour, I invent a bigger weapon.  But that could almost sum up how my approach to Wargame has evolved. It’s not just that I’ve learned how to counter unit X, or how best to use unit Y. My overall strategy, the way I look at a map and lay my plans, has shifted: first from overly-aggressive to overly-defensive, and now hopefully to a happy medium.

 

This is how I learned.

 

1. Never believe everything you read on the internet

 

The "I win" button?

 

Internet forum threads made multiplayer mode sound so easy. Most players are careless, the forumites boasted. They don’t guard their backs with anti-aircraft units, they’re heedless of the dangers that can lurk in forests. All I had to do was:

 

i. Fly over a few Black Hawks, loaded with the toughest troops money can buy.

ii. Drop off my men in forests near enemy HQs.

iii.  Laugh as they roll over unsuspecting targets.

 

Why learn the intricacies of commanding tanks, infantry, artillery? Chop off the head (eliminate all of a team’s command units) and the body dies (that team loses the game). It worked against the computer, when I tried it once! The war would be over by Christmas!

 

As it turned out, most players were not that careless. Anti-aircraft fire swatted away helicopters that flew too close, and a few tanks or flamethrowers could usually swat away commando raids. Meanwhile, I found myself regularly outplayed in the nuts-and-bolts ground war.

 

2. The art of defence; or, David vs Goliath

 

Ambush by anti-tank missile team

 

Out went the tactical gimmicks, which sounded so good on paper and were so easily countered by simple precautions. In came a focus on learning the basics of the game – down to defending against frontal assaults. Since I usually play Nato, this meant “how not to be overrun by cheap, powerful, abundant Eastern Bloc tanks.”

 

This was when I learned the value of cheap anti-tank missiles, carried by infantry (as in the above screenshot), or as in the screenshot below, jeeps and French Gazelle helicopters.

 

How to stop unsupported tanks

 

Cost of a jeep with an I-TOW missile launcher: 25 deployment points

Cost of a Gazelle with HOT missiles: 45 points

Cost of a high-end Soviet tank, such as those they demolished: 60 to 110 points

Satisfaction of gutting the enemy assault: Priceless

 

True, in this case, the opposing team had played exceptionally poorly, driving tanks down a highway with no recon; no anti-aircraft support (this had been left in the next village over, where it was completely useless); and inaccurate and mis-targeted artillery. But a victory was a victory!

 

3. The last argument of kings

 

Find good defensive position, dig in with infantry and jeeps with anti-tank missiles, support with other units as needed, massacre attackers. Win?

 

Fighting in the shade

 

The above screenshot shows my troops being rocketed by one of the most powerful artillery units in the game, the Soviet Smerch. It wasn’t quite as devastating as it looks: my column was on the move, and many of my units (e.g. the tanks) were armoured. But infantry and jeeps with anti-tank missiles are not armoured. And if they’re in a defensive position – i.e. not moving – that leaves them frightfully vulnerable to well-aimed artillery.  Guess what I encountered more and more often?

 

Clearly, finding one spot to turtle was not the answer.

 

4. The art of attack; or, know thy battlespace

 

Around the same time I realised I was placing too much emphasis on defence and not enough on manoeuvre, I watched a Youtube replay of a match between top-10 players. The contrast could not have been more stark. These guys made full use of the large map: they spread out their troops, they sent out raiding parties, they tried to flank each other using side roads, they were proactive.

 

Back to the tactical drawing board I went. It was time I rediscovered the offensive – or, to be precise, time I learned how to balance offence and defence. Time I moved freely instead of pinning myself down; time I learned to strike along one front while defending along another. And to my frequent joy, I discovered that while most players know to watch their backs against aircraft, only the better ones seem to watch their flanks.

 

A successful attack

 

The transition wasn’t instant. In my first ranked battle, I crushed my opponent with a small but powerful flanking force of tanks supported by an infantry-heavy anvil*.  Soon afterwards, in the exact same forest on the exact same map, I focused too much on the anvil only to have the enemy blast it to bits. One match exemplified this – I pushed ahead with scouts, realised the other team had left their entire flank open, and bulldozed their artillery – and while our team lost by a hair, we might just have won if I’d brought more tanks (good on attack and defence) and fewer infantry (best on defence).

 

But the trend was there. And it reached its most satisfying point in the last match I played, the source of that Smerch screenshot above. The other team brought enough artillery to blot out the sun, enough to wipe me out if I’d turtled.

 

I did not turtle.

 

A target-rich environment: enemy artillery & supply depots

 

 

When that Smerch barrage came in, my armoured column was already halfway to the other team’s artillery. My soldiers regrouped; drove on. And once they arrived, revenge was sweet. The battle wasn’t the pushover I’d hoped: the other team called in more and more tanks to defend. But slowly, surely, it went my way. When my first wave went up in flames, my second wave picked up the slack. The enemy reinforcements slowed to a trickle. And my third wave started rolling in. Our team’s score had been well behind the enemy; now it leapt up and up. We fired the last shot, and when the match finished, we were ahead in points.

 

The game called it a draw, but I know who really won.

 

* I won despite accidentally buying the wrong infantry unit to support my tanks in the “hammer”!

How to lose Crusader Kings II: a very short guide

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This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Crusader Kings II game diary, by Rachel McFadden

 

Being a small collection of ways to lose:

 

Not Enough Relatives

 

1. Lack of male heirs. No sons, no other applicable males, and no time to rush through that female inheritance law.

 

2. Failure to read the fine print. Matrilinear. Important word. If your heir is female, it’s the single most important word in the English language after “tea”. It means that her offspring will inherit her dynasty name, i.e. you can play as them. Marry your little princess off in a standard marriage – in which she joins her husband’s family – and it’s the end of your line, no matter how many bratlings she produces.

 

3. Mass death. So you’ve done your duty and provided for the succession. Then the plague/Mongols/assassins/tournament come to town, and before you know it, people are dropping dead left, right and centre due to freak bad luck.

 

Too Many Relatives

 

4. Ill-considered gavelkind. You succeed, overwhelmingly. Title after title falls into your sweaty little hands. Heirs pose no problem: you’ve got sons and to spare. Then, your character dies. Suddenly your realm fractures – and you discover that under gavelkind law, the eldest heir only receives a single “copy” of the highest level title. All “duplicates” at that level will be handed out to the younger heirs. Where before you were the King of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, you are now the King of England, with neighbourly Kings of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Back to square 1; say hello to fraternal in-fighting, and freshly predatory neighbours.

 

5. Uncles. Your new character is a 2-year-old with the ‘drooling moron’ trait. He’s rated at 0 in every stat. Even his twin sister hates him. Thanks to dear Daddy’s martial exploits, the treasury is empty, the armies are dead, and family authority shaky. Along comes dear uncle with his shiny blood claim, and it all goes like the proverbial fairytale. In no time at all moron-boy is reduced to count of a single African province which provides no income and no levies thanks to being recently conquered. Did I mention kindly Uncle has a different dynasty name to his darling nephew? Control will not pass to him should Tiny Tim have a tragic accident…

 

 

Own Petard, Hoist By

 

6. Wives. So your wife hates you, you’ve got no children, and she’s just gained the ambition to become your spymaster? She’s got a good intrigue score, and fulfilling her ambition will make her happy. What’s the worst that could happen? This could be the turning point of your relationship, the start of many years’ happy contentment and, more importantly, the source of a child or three. Two months later you notice your wine tastes funny…

 

7. Wives II: The Revenge. After 20 years of marriage you still haven’t got a child. A beautiful young courtier looks at you in a certain way, and something pops up. No, not that, thank you! An event offering you the chance of an affair. The tooltip says you have a chance at producing a bastard child! You click “Woohoo!” as quickly as your mouse will allow, brain already alight with plans for legitimising your bastard and using it as an heir. Score – one baby on the way! Then you die. Belatedly you recall that your wife has a high intrigue rating and a jealous disposition. Since it’s a mite difficult to rule a kingdom whilst in the womb, game over.

 

8. Being too liberal. Your son and heir is now a grown man. Capable of making his own decisions. Right? You give him some titles and off he goes, leaving your court to establish his own and begin building his prestige. Wait – you did marry him off before you let him go, right? You didn’t?! Now he’s free to choose his own wife. Next thing you know, you’re pasting a fixed smile on your face, shaking the hand of your chaste, octogenarian daughter-in-law and wondering how much it will cost to get her removed. Then you notice your son’s spymaster is way better than yours, and you’ve no chance of killing her. Oh well, at that age nature will soon take its course, right? Amazingly, this elderly lady out-lives both her husband and her father-in-law.

 

9. Marriage. You marry your daughter to the son of a powerful neighbour. It’s all good, right? You’ve got a powerful ally, and the next generation on that throne will have your blood – oh crap! Your blood! Thanks to your current laws, that means a claim on your titles, and their army is like ten times bigger than yours! Kill the happy couple? It’s the only hope! Assassin fail, assassin fail, assassin fail, bankruptcy, discovery, pissed off marriage-ally, train headed down tunnel right at your face.

 

10. Getting too clever for your own good. Family tree grown a bit messy? Too many people got blood links and claims to your shiny stuff? The future could get scary. Why not tidy things up a little with the aid of your good friend, Mr Assassin? Yay! Now the tree is all nice and neat, like a pretty little bonsai. Then your heir discovers he prefers other men, your daughter-in-law takes to religion in a hardcore way, and your sole grandkid dies of the plague. Whoops!

 

 

Live By The Sword…

 

11. Pope-assisted suicide. So you’re the lord of a tiny realm with an income of three goats and a sheep per year? Life’s sweet – in another 70 years you will be able to afford that rickety wooden palisade castle upgrade which you’ve been eyeing for the last 2 generations! Then along comes Il Papa with his talk of glory, religious duty, and sweet, sweet loot, and off you rush on Crusade, eyes a-gleam at the thought of funding a new chicken coop with liberated gold. Only to realise that one province target has a whole alliance network, meaning half of the Muslim universe is now coming to visit you at home. Peace? They don’t want peace – they want your chickens, your palisade fund, and your sole title! Meanwhile, the rest of Christendom wisely decided to sit this one out.

 

12. Ambitious AI lords. When your liege, King Suicide McDeath III, declares war on a more powerful kingdom for the twentieth time that decade, you’d better find a get-out clause in that vassalage-contract, or you’re going down in a flame of bankruptcy, rebels, stress, battle wounds, and angry mercenaries.

 

13. HRE. That’s Holy Roman Empire for those of you who don’t have the game. You are a minor lord. You’re outside the HRE. The HRE think that by rights you should be part of it. They declare war. Approximately 100,000,000,000 soldiers are now headed your way, supported by the wealth of half Europe. Your army of 11 people and a pig stand no chance! Swiftly, you send a grovelling peace offer. Denied! They want your title, without you attached. And since you can’t give away your last title, that means…

 

14. Pagans. Hi, I’m the King of Poland. My realm is compact, and pretty, and peaceful, and rich, and it’s got some nice armies too. Life is happy! Oh look, one of my neighbours is a one-province pagan dude with no allies. He will be easy to crush. Based on the number of soldiers I get from my provinces, he should have around 250 soldiers. War time! Let’s loot – er, convert the savages. Argh! Where did they all come from, the thousands of angry pagans, with the anger and the pointy weapons, and did I mention that there’s thousands of them!? Gah! My armies are all dead without so much as denting the hordes! Now all my other pagan neighbours are declaring war on me too! God? I need some help spreading Your word (and not dying) here. God? Are You there? God? God!?

 

Being a small collection of ways to win:

 

1. Survive over 300 years and reach the end date. You’ll get shown your score, and probably be told you did worse than various historical dynasties.

 

2. Lose.

 

3. I mean it: lose.

 

4. Losing is far more fun than building a huge kingdom and holding it until 1453. Thus, winning is losing by another name. Losing, now that’s a whole pile of win!

 

Rachel McFadden (aka frogbeastegg) has been gaming since she discovered the original Prince of Persia on the IBM 286sx PC. Whilst strategy and RPGs are her preferred genres, she is a multiplatform gamer who will play almost anything provided it isn’t sport, car racing, or multiplayer only. Under the frogbeastegg name Rachel has written guides for many of the Total War series, various AARs for strategy games, and a few pieces of fiction. When not engaged in reminding various virtual populaces that she is in fact the Supreme Ruler of the Universe and the One True Hero, Rachel can typically be found with her nose in a book.

 

Note: the above comments are based on a review copy supplied by the game’s developer, Paradox Interactive.

The Panzer General’s grandson: an introduction to Wargame: European Escalation

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This entry is part 1 of 12 in the series Wargame: European Escalation/AirLand Battle/Red Dragon
Going into action

 

It took a lot to drag me away from Crusader Kings 2; “ a lot” came in the form of Wargame: European Escalation, the Cold-War-gone-hot RTS from RUSE developer Eugen Systems. I’m still climbing its learning curve, but I’ve played enough to get a decent taste of its campaign, multiplayer, and to a lesser extent, skirmish modes. Several things stand out:

 

Simulation meets accessibility

 

Just as Panzer General did for the mid-nineties, Wargame: European Escalation does for 2012. Specifically, it’s a beer-and-pretzels wargame, a title that combines real-world principles such as morale, logistics, visibility, and flanking with a sleek, approachable RTS veneer. Terrain matters: driving along a highway is faster, but leaves you vulnerable to anyone lurking nearby, while forests can provide shelter for special forces raids. Think a deeper version of the tactical battles in Total War, one that also allowed you to call on reinforcements in mid-battle.

 

For example, take the above screenshot, from the second level of the campaign. My units are blue; the computer’s, in brown. My attack is occurring along three prongs: I have tanks pushing up from the left and the centre, but on the right, hidden by the forest, I have another mixed force of tanks and infantry ready to move up and hit the enemy in the flank. Tanks have much weaker armour on their sides than on their fronts, so this works just as well as it does in Total War. This was a huge risk, because I’d have been unable to see anyone hidden in the middle of the forest – and tanks are horribly vulnerable to point-blank ambushes – but it paid off! If I’d simply charged up the road in the middle, things would have gone much less well. Note the enemy tanks in the hedgerow at the upper middle of the picture – a frontal assault may very well have led to me being the one taking fire from the sides.

 

Just as important are the other supporting units. Recon units, the ones with the binoculars next to their names, are vital to spotting ambushes and keeping an eye on the enemy’s movements – and in this game, if you can see a unit, you can probably kill it. Anti-tank missile teams can make short work of even the most expensive tanks, but tend to carry little ammo and can’t shoot on the move. Artillery is horribly inaccurate when fired blindly, but when someone – such as those guys with binoculars! – has a line of sight on their target, an artillery barrage can stun, panic, or disorient defenders, and kill the lightly armoured ones outright… such as, say, those anti-tank crews. Helicopters are target practice if you have good anti-aircraft units, and murder if you don’t. What happens if I aim my best artillery not at the other guy’s tanks, but at his AA? Supply trucks and helicopters are unglamorous, but resupplying fuel and ammunition is vital.

 

Unit variety/unlocks

 

The tip of the iceberg: some of the game's tanks

 

Real-world tactics demand real-world units, and Wargame’s metagame revolves around unlocking these. Completing campaign objectives or playing multiplayer (not skirmish!) matches will earn stars, and different units have a varying cost in stars to unlock. Normally I would not be a fan of this; however, earning stars is quick enough for me not to mind.

 

So, how many units are there in all? According to Eugen, the answer is over 350: light tanks, heavy tanks, old tanks, new tanks, jeeps, scout cars, mortars, artillery, rocket artillery, recon helicopters, attack helicopters, infantry in personnel carriers, infantry in transport helicopters… These vary across a range of dimensions: weapons, armour, accuracy, speed, fuel/ammo capacity, and cost in deployment points. Even accounting for duplicates and units that occupy the same niche, that is a lot of choices. Some are clearly over- or under-powered for their cost, but Eugen’s balance patches are chipping away at this list. Most are situational, and this is the beauty of the unlock system. Stars are abundant enough for me to have lots of cool toys to play with, but not so abundant that I have every cool toy to play with, which forces me to make interesting decisions even before I begin a match.

 

The single-player campaign

 

Wargame includes a 22-mission campaign, divided into four smaller sub-campaigns (which you have to play in sequence). So far I’m up to the fifth mission, and I think the best way to describe these would be “challenges”.

 

The campaign missions are challenges in two senses. First, they’re difficult. Usually, but not always, they require driving the computer from specified locations; this can be tricky for several reasons. First, the computer is often well dug in. Second, while there is no formal time limit to attack (though winning in X time can be a bonus objective), finite supplies impose a practical limit – turtle too long and you could run low on ammo. Third, you have to keep casualties down: there are only finite troops available in each mini-campaign, and keeping units alive from mission to mission allows them to gain experience (once again, a la Panzer General). Fourth, the computer can counterattack – in one mission I didn’t cover my flanks, leading to the enemy rolling up my supply lines and almost wiping me out! I won that mission in the end, but it was by the skin of my teeth: a crazy drive by a single command jeep to the victory objective*. The net effect is that after the first mission (effectively a tutorial), I’ve really had to work for each victory.

 

Second, the campaign feels as though the game designers have set me a string of problems, each of which is meant to teach me something. “Peter,” Professor Wargame says when I play the campaign, “the computer is dug into positions A, B and C, and it’s scripted to do X, Y, and Z. Given this set of tools, how would you achieve your objective?” And it succeeds at this. At the end of each mission, win or lose, I tend to walk away feeling as though I’ve learned something about modern military tactics. There is an element of hindsight involved when I replay missions, but so far, I feel as though I could have won the first time through with better tactics. For example, the three-pronged attack in the screenshot at the top followed my belated discovery of the perils of a frontal assault, and “okay, I’ll come under attack from this direction, so I’d better place some tanks over there!” could have been avoided had I kept scouts on all approaches. (I’m avoiding the word ‘puzzle’, which implies there’s only one solution to each mission; in a game with this many units, there has to be more than one.)

 

Note that the campaign is effectively story-less. A brief cutscene outlines the premise of each mini-campaign, but from mission to mission the context is limited to a narrator intoning that the BAOR has entered the fray or that NATO forces are attempting to encircle the Eighth Guards Army. I don’t mind; RTSes aren’t known for their writing anyway.

 

Skirmish and multiplayer

 

The skirmish and multiplayer modes feel very distinct from the more rigid campaign. Here, each team starts on opposite sides of the map, with an equally-sized pool of deployment points. There are objective areas scattered around the map, but ultimately the goal is to kill more of the enemy than you lose yourself – victory goes either to the side that first kills X points of units, or to the side with the greater kill score when the timer runs out. Lastly, whereas the campaign specifies the unit types available but lets you add as many as you can afford, skirmish/MP limits you to taking up to 25 different types (your “deck”) into a game.

 

The skirmish mode (limited to 1v1 matches) is passable, from what little I’ve seen. The skirmish AI plays a lot like an inexperienced human! I’ve seen it drive tanks too close to potential ambush locations, and I recently saw the AI open by spamming helicopters –terrifyingly effective against my initial line-up, but a game-loser once I responded with massed anti-aircraft units. However, these are the sorts of things that newbie players do – I know I’ve made the same mistakes – and as such, I’m not going to cast stones at the AI quite yet. The bigger problem with skirmish, as noted above, is that this mode doesn’t award stars for unlocking units. In other words, you cannot play this as a pure skirmish game. You’ll have to earn stars via the campaign, multiplayer, or both. This has been changed in a patch.

 

Multiplayer is where I’ve spent the most time. Rather annoyingly, the game often crashes while I’m trying to find/start a match, though it’s rock-solid once play begins. However, the quality of the MP gameplay is good enough for me to forgive the developers. The variety of units, the unlock system, the large map sizes, and the emphasis on tactics combine to create a plethora of interesting decisions: if I unlock this and that, could they form the hammer and anvil of an attack force? Do I hold at this juicy objective, or do I look for a more defensible position that brings in fewer deployment points? How do I ensure my deck can counter this common tactic? Hey, that guy rolled over me with an army of this! What should I unlock to counter it? And what do I have to jettison from my deck in order to make room?

 

Note that comp stomps aren’t currently in the game – for now MP is strictly PvP. However, Eugen has stated that it’ll patch this feature in within the month, so I look forward to trying it out. Comp stomps have now been patched in.

 

At this stage, I expect I’ll focus more on multiplayer than on the campaign. While the campaign feels cerebral, so does a maths lesson; I personally prefer the fluidity of multiplayer. However, the campaign’s style of gameplay could be more to others’ liking.

 

Stay tuned for further updates!

 

* It’s for this reason that I don’t believe the common forum assertion that the AI is omniscient. If it were, surely it would have pounced on my poor jeep?

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion beta – my first look & postcards

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This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion

When the Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion beta opened to pre-order customers, I jumped at the chance to give the game a test-drive. I played a single 1v1 game vs AI (both of us as the TEC Loyalists, the game’s specialist turtle faction) on a small map. Here are my quick observations:

 

This is still recognisably Sins of a Solar Empire: Compared to the base game, the UI is the same, 95% of the units are the same, and the overall “look” and “feel” are the same. As a stand-alone expansion, it’s probably best to think of this as Sins of a Solar Empire: Deluxe.

 

… but some of the graphical effects have been improved. Missiles, in particular, look far prettier, which benefits the Marza and the Javelis. Incoming barrages have never looked so spectacular:

 

For what we are about to receive…

 

Titans are powerful but not unstoppable: These super-ships are one of Rebellion’s most heavily-promoted additions; however, while formidable, the TEC Loyalist titan (pictured in the foreground of the two screenshots in this post) is no instant death machine. While my titan fought an upgraded AI starbase to a standstill (yes, I know, I should have brought torpedo cruisers, but I wanted to test the titan in action), it couldn’t damage the starbase quickly enough for me to keep my fleet in-system once enemy reinforcements showed up.

The new victory conditions seem geared to larger maps: Rebellion contains four new victory conditions: (1) lose your homeworld; (2) lose a starting special unit; (3) science; and (4) hold a victory location. I felt the original Sins could really have used (3) and (4), so I enabled those two in my test game, but I found it simpler to just steamroll the computer player. The science victory requires 8 civilian research labs and that you research 50 techs first, preconditions not likely to be met except in a very long game; and the independent fleet guarding the victory location – including a starbase and a titan! – looked like a tougher nut to crack than any of the AI worlds. As such, I expect the new victory conditions to be most useful on larger maps or in games with more than 2 players.

 

As the in-game loading screen reminds us, Rebellion is still very much a work in progress – for instance, the Advent and the Vasari aren’t even in the current beta yet – so for now I’ll probably hold off until it’s closer to release. I look forward to writing a more detailed preview at that time.

 

For now, here’s another screenshot from my Rebellion game. At the same time as my titan was shooting it out with the starbase (foreground), my conventional fleet was exchanging missiles with the enemy (background). I’ve played Sins for so long that its visuals have lost their awe for me; Rebellion has restored some of that magic.

 

Now, witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational Titan!

Crusader Kings II: Feudalism: domain thing?

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This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Crusader Kings II game diary, by Rachel McFadden

As everyone and their pot plant will be aware, Crusader Kings II is a medieval-themed strategy game. What comes as a surprise to many people is that it’s a medieval-themed game, not a knights-and-kingdoms themed game. Let me explain.

 

Your average medieval strategy game is akin to a theme park view of history. You select one of the major kingdoms and, using knights and other period-themed units, seek to kill everyone who is not you. Change the paintwork and the same template is used for Three Kingdoms China, Victorian Europe, Ancient Rome – anywhere. Alternatively, you’re placed in command of a settlement and need to build up breweries and bowyers whilst killing the naughty macemen attempting to knock your settlement down. Meanwhile, Crusader Kings II isn’t afraid to deploy words like “agnatic primogeniture”.

 

The gameplay structure responsible for much of CKII‘s difference in medieval tone is its incorporation of the feudal system. Or, as the old historian’s joke goes, the feuding system. Whilst much recent debate has occurred on how the feudal system worked, the game uses the classic template favoured by generations of earlier scholars. It’s one many children will have encountered in their text books and which is simple to grasp. Society forms a big pyramid. Emperors sit at the top, then kings, then dukes, then counts, then barons, then the teeming masses of ignoble birth. The church hierarchy mirrors the secular, with the Pope at the top as an honorary king. All land is owned, usually by the person at the top of the title chain. Parcels of land were granted to followers, partly to ensure their loyalty and partly to cope with the administrative difficulties involved in ruling during the period. Anyone holding land from another person is termed a “vassal”.  Land ownership is not transferred to the vassal. It’s easiest for the modern mind to view it as rented, with the rent paid by provision of troops, personal loyalty, and political support. A vassal will expect to pass his lands on to his heir, however, and society views this as a reasonable and just expectation. Go against it at your peril, tyrant! Stripping a vassal of his titles will cause large amounts of ill-feeling across the realm, no matter what the vassal has done to upset you. Far safer to imprison them, wait for them to die of neglect, and hope that their heir is more reasonably disposed towards you. A vassal with a large amount of land may create vassals of his own, using people one step below him on the pyramid.

 

For the sake of simplicity CKII pairs each parcel of land with a set title: if you have the title then you have the land, if you have a claim on the title then you have a claim on the land and can attempt to win it to your control, and if you lack both then that parcel of land is out of your reach unless it belongs to a non-Christian ruler. Religious warfare does not require legal rationalization; the right of the sword is sufficient justification. The correct name for these parcels of land varies depending on the culture of the people living there, so many players use the old standby name of the strategy genre: provinces. One province gets you a count title, or its regional equivalent. Two or more provinces can join together to create a duchy or equivalent. Multiple duchies form a kingdom, or one of the two possible empires. On the province level, the game takes a lean to the detailed side, and introduces sub-holdings inside each province. A province will start with a city, religious foundation, or castle as its controlling sub-holding. After that, there are up to 6 slots for further settlements of these types inside the province. Each of these sub-holdings can also be handed out to a vassal, giving the holder a minor title like mayor. In the event of conflict, capturing the controlling castle will give an invader partial control over a province. Full control is only gained when every single sub-holding has been taken.

 

 

 

The pictures above and below show a quick example. The entire island forms the Kingdom of Ireland. Each of the green patches with a label is a duchy. Provinces are the smaller divisions visible within each duchy. The second screenshot shows the province view for Thomond, part of the Duchy of Munster. The castle at the top next to the person’s portrait is the controlling castle. Below, two boxes are filled in with settlements and one shows only an empty field, ready for the owner to construct a new sub-holding of his choice. The empty grey space below will gradually open up so that further sub-holdings can be constructed.

 

 

 

Each feudal lord, be he count or king, has what is known as a “demesne” (pronounced “demain”, natch), which counts the total amount of land he can personally control. A player returning from the original Crusader Kings might expect demesne to be measured in provinces. It is not. Instead it is measured in sub-holdings. If the game says you can hold 7 items in your demesne, it does not mean 7 provinces, it means 7 castles or cities. The size of your demesne is influenced by your laws and by your character’s stats. With the right set of circumstances you can hold a lot more land than usual, with all the benefits that brings. Benefits? Land held in demesne will contribute the full amount of troops when you summon your levies. You also gain tax income, which varies considerably depending on your technology level, buildings, and laws. Cumulatively, this demesne limit introduces two new feudal factors. Firstly, it’s possible for a character who holds a lot of titles to have his personal demesne scattered across a wide area. This is as advantageous or detrimental as you make it. Wise demesne selection will let you keep your armies in key locations, and give you control of the richest provinces. Poor selection can leave your forces scattered and your coffers struggling. Sometimes it is better to centralise your holdings. The second factor is that it ensures the creation of sub-vassals, and this keeps the feudal system flourishing throughout the game. It is not possible for a player to blot out half of the game in order to play as a complete control freak.

 

Simple enough, right? You want to be on the top of the pyramid, and better than your peers. You want to hold the juiciest sub-holdings in your demesne, and to pass the whole conglomerate on to your chosen heir in the hopes he may add to it, in turn passing an enriched realm on to his own heir. That is, in a nutshell, the game.

 

It’s the systems arising from this that make the game so gripping. Without the feudal system, the game wouldn’t need characters, dynasties, inheritance, or laws. Without claims, intrigue would be much less important, and war would lose its main limiting factor. Without vassals, it wouldn’t need inter-character relationships, and intrigue’s remaining usage would be removed. In short, without the feudal system this would be another game about pushing shiny knights around a map for world conquest. Not terribly medieval.

 

Some of these topics deserve articles of their own, instead of being stapled onto the end of this one. Character relationships, dynasties, warfare, intrigue – these and more will be covered in the future. For the time being I shall limit myself to two areas which tie in most strongly with the legalities of feudalism: levies, and laws.

 

Levies are fairly straightforward. Each sub-holding has a pool of men which can be summoned to arms. That pool is determined by a variety of factors, but mainly by the type of sub-holding and its upgrade level. A castle will emphasise heavy troops like knights, whereas a city will produce more militia-grade soldiers, such as bowmen. Each sub-holding can be upgraded with various buildings, increasing the number of soldiers available for the levy. As previously mentioned, when a sub-holding is in the demesne of a character, they can summon the entire levy. If your character personally holds a castle which has 500 men available, you will be able to use all 500 of then. If the sub-holding is held by a vassal, then the overlord only has access to a percentage of the total levy. The percentage is decided by the laws which are applicable to the province where the holding is located, and on the vassal’s feeling towards his overlord. The more a vassal likes his lord, the more troops he is willing to provide. A kingdom might have massive military potential, yet still be hamstrung by an extremely unpopular king using weak crown laws. If such a kingdom ended up at war, the king would need to hire mercenaries or hope his vassals took up arms of their own accord. The classic feudal requirements historically used in most of Europe called for the vassal to do 40 days of military service each year. Anything after that was not required, and performed either out of personal loyalty or in return for pay. The game reflects this, with vassals slowly becoming unhappy if you keep their levies called up for too long. As many historical kings discovered, sometimes 40 days is not even enough time to get the soldiers to the battlefield! If you needed another reason to keep your vassals happy, this is it. Deeply unhappy vassals may well judge abuse of their levies to be the final straw.

 

Laws split into two main categories: inheritance and realm. Inheritance laws are best saved for another article. Realm laws govern how many troops you can summon from each vassal, the taxes vassals must pay, and how strong crown authority is. The first two are self-explanatory. The third is … interesting. At low crown authority, a king is helpless to prevent his vassals squabbling amongst themselves, even to the point of them taking up arms against each other. The best he can do is support one side or the other. At higher levels of crown authority, private warfare is banned and vassals can only choose to fight outside entities. At the lowest level of crown authority, it is completely impossible to revoke a vassal’s title even if you are willing to be seen as a tyrant. The third drawback to low crown authority is perhaps the most tolerable; you are not permitted to choose the generals in command of your raised armies. In the current build of the game, generals have very little influence over combat results, so it’s not the end of the world when the Earl of Sidethorn insists on placing his cousin Cowardly Noskill in command of his contribution to your feudal levy. I expect future builds will increase the importance of good generals, and this will then become a harsher penalty. At the highest levels of crown authority, vassals can barely sneeze without permission! Naturally they hate this – each increased level of crown authority causes a relationship hit with a character’s vassals.

 

If after reading this you are thinking that the game sounds complicated, well, it is and it isn’t. Provided you can remember the simple feudal pyramid, and accept that you should be thinking in terms of medieval lords working to improve their family’s circumstances in a world filled with AI-controlled characters seeking to do precisely the same, you shouldn’t have much trouble. If you are under someone’s thumb, work to get free by climbing the pyramid so that you stand at the same rank as your overlord. If you have others under your thumb, work to keep them there and to add to your vassal collection. As you play and see the Crusader Kings II feudal system in action, you will start to pick up the more advanced aspects. Until then it’s possible – and enjoyable – to play the game almost like an RPG, picking options and making decisions according to what you think sounds coolest.

 

Rachel McFadden (aka frogbeastegg) has been gaming since she discovered the original Prince of Persia on the IBM 286sx PC. Whilst strategy and RPGs are her preferred genres, she is a multiplatform gamer who will play almost anything provided it isn’t sport, car racing, or multiplayer only. Under the frogbeastegg name Rachel has written guides for many of the Total War series, various AARs for strategy games, and a few pieces of fiction. When not engaged in reminding various virtual populaces that she is in fact the Supreme Ruler of the Universe and the One True Hero, Rachel can typically be found with her nose in a book.

 

Note: the above comments are based on a review copy supplied by the game’s developer, Paradox Interactive.

Conquest of Elysium 3: The Verdict

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This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Conquest of Elysium

Introduction

 

One look at Conquest of Elysium 3, the new fantasy turn-based strategy game from Illwinter Game Design, and you would think you’d stepped into a classic 4X. You begin by choosing a faction (one of 18 character classes) and a map type (one of six eras), and when you start play, the following screen is straight out of every 4X ever made:

 

Humble beginnings

 

One citadel, two commanders (lose all your citadels or commanders, and it’s game over), a handful of guards, and a whole, randomised, unexplored world. Now go out and conquer it!

 

However, the truth is very different. While COE3 wears the trappings of the 4X genre, it boils down three of the genre’s four elements into something that’s not just simpler and faster to play, but also distinct in emphasis and feel. As such, this is to 4X games what 30-second RPG Half-Minute Hero was to Final Fantasy; the parallels are there, but they point in a different direction.

 

Explore and expand

 

To begin with, unlike a 4X game, you won’t even be able to build anything at the start of COE3. Early on, troops are expensive – too expensive to afford with just your starting citadel! So how do you expand your army?

 

The answer lies with the useful locations that dot Elysium. Some will provide resources to fund the expansion of your army. Some will count as new citadels, allowing you to recruit troops in the field as well as moving all your eggs out of one basket. Some will let you power up your mages, and so on. So the first order of business is to find, and then secure, those locations.

 

Even within a category, not all locations are created equal. For starters, different classes need different resources. Settlements and mines provide gold and iron, which everybody needs. If you’re playing a vanilla human class, the Baron or the Senator, those are all the resources you need: go bury the world in knights and legionaries! However, most classes will need other resources to unlock their special abilities: the Troll King gathers fungus from forests for magic rituals, the Dwarf Queen and the Warlock collect magic gems from mines, and so on. Different classes might also get bonuses/penalties to specific locations: the Senator makes more money from everything, while the Dwarves make more money from mines and less from settlements.

 

On top of that, different locations are also guarded by independent forces of varying strength. Generally, a prize will be commensurate with the difficulty of taking it: you might find one or two spearmen defending a farm that brings in 1 gold per turn, while a city bringing in 5 gold and 2 trade (allowing you to buy/sell other resources) might be held by 20 men with zweihanders and longbows. Still, that’s only a general rule. No two locations of the same type will have exactly the same defenders, so stumbling across a soft, juicy target is a big part of the thrill of exploration.

 

Once you’ve taken a location, you’ll then need to hold it. Even leaving aside other players, Elysium is packed with wandering independent monsters (deer, bandits, snakes, undead…), and more will spawn from their lairs. These will constantly raid your possessions, and movement in the game is slow enough that you likely won’t want to circle your main force back to recapture lost ground. But detach too many men for garrison duty, and you could slow your expansion.

 

Early expansion, then, is a constant, delicious trade-off between risk and reward (do I have enough troops to take that mine?), followed by a juggling act between offence and defence (how many troops can I safely leave behind to garrison it)? For me, the game is strongest in this phase, when every turn is filled with curiosity about what may lie over the next hill; excitement when I discover my El Dorado; and a stream of interesting decisions.

 

A tale of two cities

 

The above screenshot illustrates this aspect of COE3. In this game, I hit the jackpot: two cities nearby, one of which was held by a mere eight men! Unfortunately, I promptly squandered it: when I rushed in to attack, those eight men were plenty to wipe out my attacking force, including my only two commanders. Game over.

 

Hey, what happened to “Exploit”?

 

Why were those cities such a big deal? Could I have established my own? Well, no. Importantly, there is precious little economic or empire management in COE3. For example, research is important in Civilization or Dominions, but in COE3 there is no research and no tech tree. If you want a magician to learn a new spell, you conquer a library, sequester him/her for several turns, and watch as he/she emerges with a new entry in the spellbook. Similarly, there is virtually no “guns or butter”, virtually no way to invest in one’s economy now for a future payoff, and little terrain improvement.

 

There are exceptions. The Burgmeister, who presides over a nation of diminutive, weed-growing humanoids, can spend money to “colonise” farms and transform them into more productive hoburg villages. A couple of the other classes can transform the map to increase their unit production: the Troll King’s allies can spend resources to haunt forests, which makes them spawn friendly wandering monsters, while the Dwarf Queen has to invest gems and gold to set up new daughter colonies. Still, this game’s emphasis is firmly on fighting wars, not winning the peace.

 

Exterminate!

 

When you do march into an independent city, you’re counterattacked by monsters, or when another player’s army shows up, it’s time to fight. You have no control over combat once it starts; instead, the game will show you a turn-by-turn replay of the fight. The following screenshot shows my late-game army in action against a computer player:

 

Fight it out!

 

Note that each army is lined up in rows. The concept is a little like Ogre Battle or Disciples: a unit’s abilities depend on which row it’s in. Melee units in the back rows will be unable to attack, archers in the front row will attack with daggers instead of their primary weapons, and so on. Here, though, you don’t choose who goes into which row – archers and crossbowmen are always in the middle, swordsmen always towards the front, and so on. On its turn, each unit then picks a random target, usually limited to the enemy’s front row (certain attacks are an exception).

 

As a result, army composition is where much of the game’s strategy lies. For example, multiple rows of ranged units can all shoot while only the front row of melee units can attack. But those melee units at the front must survive to shield the archers. So how might I best divide my army between the two? Returning to the above screenshot, my front rows comprise the most heavily armoured infantrymen I can recruit, plus hulking fire, earth and water elementals – ordinary grunts have the life expectancy of mayflies. Behind them I have two rows of archers and crossbowmen (the soldiers in the red trousers), plus a lightning-throwing air elemental (the cloud/tornado in the middle). At the very back are my leaders: the Great Warlock of Water (in blue) and his apprentice (in saffron). This combination worked like a dream: the infantrymen and elementals held fast, the crossbowmen compounded my firepower, and the Great Warlock laid waste to whole rows of the enemy army with his high-level magic.

 

My army would probably have looked quite different had I been playing another class. My Warlock started with a roster of generic human soldiers (paid for with gold and iron), supplemented these with elementals (paid for with gems), and boosted his own magic (gems again). By contrast, the Troll King fields a handful of powerful, expensive behemoths (himself foremost among them!), accompanying mages who can scry out their next target, and goblin cannon-fodder. Playing the Warlock feels like leading an army; playing the Troll King feels like leading a small but elite raiding party, marching to a soothsayer’s tune. Not every army is as distinct as the Troll King’s, but that still leaves variety: for instance, the Senator relies on row after row of legionaries, armed with javelins for ranged combat and gladii for melee. No need to worry about separate spear- and crossbowmen for him!

 

Eventually, it’s time to take the war to the other players (if they haven’t been destroyed by other AIs or the independent monsters). Unfortunately, for me this is the least satisfying part of the game. True, it’s fun to finally unleash late-game units and magic, and there are still some interesting decisions to be made. Do I go for an early attack or a late one? (For example, from what I’ve seen the Troll King is much better suited to rushing; early on he can clean out entire villages by himself, but he can’t solo even a mid-sized army.) Do I split my forces to raid the enemy’s settlements? Can I beat that army or do I fall back on my citadel and wait for reinforcements? But in my experience, this all boils down to who has the nastier stack of doom. Either I show up with a bigger army and steamroll the other player, or the other player shows up with a bigger army and steamrolls me. No control over battles means no scope for superior tactics, and no economic management means precious few levers to pull to ensure I have a bigger army in the first place. This is fine when I’m playing explorer and stomping independents; less fine when the other players can try to stomp me back. Presumably the player with the better army did a better job of exploring and securing the map earlier on, had a better grasp of army composition, had a luckier starting position, or all of the above. But for whatever reason, victory or defeat too often feels like a black box to me.

 

After winning or losing, it’s time to start another game. This is feasible in a way it wouldn’t be in the typical 4X game: you can finish a COE3 “large” map in maybe an hour or two, and smaller maps in significantly less. The best analogy is skirmish mode in an RTS – something you can keep replaying in bite-sized sessions – but with random maps.

 

The Verdict

 

Ultimately, a food metaphor might be the best way to sum up Conquest of Elysium 3. Its big brother, Dominions 3, is like learning how to cook: difficult and time-consuming, but blissfully rewarding in the end. The typical 4X game, say Civilization or Master of Magic/Orion, resembles a meal at a buffet restaurant: enjoyable, filling, and replete with choice, but not something you can quickly consume. COE3, with apologies to Forrest Gump, is more like a box of chocolates. Like a box of chocolates, it’s filled with variety, courtesy of its 18 factions, six eras, and imaginative developers. Like a box of chocolates, it’s better at the start (this is a good game about exploration) than at the end (when I have to fight other players with a toolkit better suited to the player-vs-environment gameplay of the opening phases). And, just like a box of chocolates, COE3 is better suited for snacking than for full meals. If you’re after a light, quick-playing game, one that encourages you to reach in, take a bite, and come back later to sample different flavours, COE3 is worth a look.

 

Hopefully Illwinter will release a demo soon, but for now, you can download its predecessor (Conquest of Elysium 2, 1997) as freeware here; or buy the full game from Desura. Update: there is now a demo available.

 

The basis of my review

 

Time spent with the game: I estimate at least 10-15 hours.

 

What I have played: The Warlock, Senator, Baron, Troll King, Dwarf Queen, Enchanter, Burgmeister, and Barbarian characters.

 

What I haven’t played: Multiplayer; the remaining characters; any difficulty level that gives the computer a bonus.

 

Note: the above comments are based on a review copy supplied by the game’s developer, Illwinter Game Design.

 

I hope you enjoyed this post! To quickly find this post, and my other reviews, click the “reviews” tab at the top of this page.

Conquest of Elysium 3 first impressions: Not quite a chip off the old block

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This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Conquest of Elysium

Dominions 3, Illwinter’s 2006 magnum opus, is one of my all-time favourite games, but its depth and complexity make it a time-consuming beast. And so I jumped when I heard Illwinter’s latest title, Conquest of Elysium 3, was simpler and quicker-to-play. Dominions Lite, here I come! Instead, I found something very different.

 

My very first impressions of COE3 were misleading. Setting up a new game was an experience straight out of Dominions: I chose which era I wanted to play in, chose my leader (COE3’s equivalent of a Dominions faction+pretender combination), and emerged on the map screen to see sprites, and hear sound effects, taken straight from Dominions. It was only after playing a few games that I realised how dissimilar COE3 felt.

 

You call that a treasury?

 

Dominions 3 is about the clash of empires. Your resources are vast, but so are the claims on them. Every turn, tax revenues and magic gems will flood into your treasury, and even though you will never have enough of each, you will typically have enough to spend on something. You will raise enormous armies across dozens of provinces; script elaborate orders for your sorcerers; constantly research new and better magic. And your rival pretender gods do the same. They are the main threat, not the independent provinces meekly waiting to be bulldozed.

 

COE3, in contrast, is about scarcity. Your handful of commanders, and their retinues, must explore the map in search of farms and villages and mines, then fight their independent defenders tooth and nail – or, frequently, just move onto easier targets. Once you’ve taken the sites, you can’t just abandon them: wandering monsters are a constant threat. But if you leave 3 men to hold this village, and 5 to hold that gold mine, sooner or later those garrisons start adding up. Then it’s time to march back to your castle to pick up fresh recruits, if you can afford them – early on, amassing enough coin to recruit 5 or 10 soldiers is a big deal. Even later on, an army of 100 human soldiers (a modest task force in Dominions 3) would be an awesome host in COE3. The overall feel is of leading a few small bands through a savage land; think Mad Max or Fallout: The Strategy Game.

 

The net effect is that Dominions 3 fans shouldn’t go into Conquest of Elysium 3 expecting more (or less?) of the same. After playing heaven knows how much Dominions 3, my early experiences with COE3 have been rather like meeting the child of an old friend. The resemblance is there in the eyes and nose; but the soul behind them is entirely its bearer’s own.

 

Stay tuned for more!

 

Note: the above comments are based on a review copy supplied by the game’s developer, Illwinter Game Design.

Guest post: One hour with Crusader Kings II, by Rachel McFadden

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This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Crusader Kings II game diary, by Rachel McFadden

History is good. Games are good. Vivid, memorable characters are good. Could a historical game packed with vivid, memorable characters, Paradox’s Crusader Kings II, be best of all? In the following guest post, the first of a series, Rachel McFadden (aka frogbeastegg) sets out to answer this.

 

Note: the following comments are based on a review copy supplied by the game’s developer, Paradox Interactive.

***

 

My first hour with a new PC game follows a time-honoured pattern. I read the manual whilst the game installs. In the days of 20GB installs and pamphlet manuals, I usually need to add a chapter of my current book to fill the downtime. Next, I dutifully check for patches. When the game’s finally ready to launch, I do so and watch any opening cinematics. After that, I fiddle with the options screens. If there’s a tutorial, I’ll go there next, whether it looks useful or not. Only after all of this rigmarole do I settle down with a cup of tea to start playing the game proper.

 

Boring! Traditional. Traditionally boring?

 

In Crusader Kings II, I spent my first hour running around the game set-up screen whilst my inner history geek squealed with joy.

 

It all began innocently enough. I scouted around the map a little, looking at the various kings and independent rulers in the ‘William the Conqueror 1066’ scenario. After locating most of the famous names from the period and chuckling at their portraits, I started to look at their vassals. Sure enough, I spotted the obvious names. There’s this king’s brother, here’s that duke’s nephew, there’s that famous daughter, and oh my gosh that’s pseudo-saint Waltheof of Huntingdon prior to his little mishap with a headsman’s axe! Selecting the vassals meant I could see their courts, and another round of name-spotting swept across Europe. Then I did the same thing with the other bookmarks.

 

Having exhausted the scenarios, I looked speculatively at a certain control which is in most Paradox games, one I’ve seldom found useful as it mainly makes minor changes to national borders. I cautiously clicked on a button. I grinned. Ladies and gentlemen, CKII features a fully functional time machine!

 

 

The scenarios act as bookmarks that store specific dates. Using the time machine you can choose your own starting date, right down to the very day. It turns out that CKII has historical data for the entire time range, not just the specified starting points. As you play with the dates the world shifts and changes – characters age or grow younger before your eyes, titles rise and fall, and all sorts of extra historical personages appear onto the scene. Start in 1066 with William the Conqueror and move forward, there’s William II, forward, Henry I, forward, Stephen I, forward, Henry II – the line will continue in historically correct form up to the latest date the game supports, January 1st 1337. It’s not only the English royal line that does this. Every single title on the map will do the same, from the mightiest of Sultans to the most minor of counts. Their vassals and courts will likewise update.

 

Needless to say, I spent another half hour with this new toy.

 

With the discovery of the time machine, I pushed the game to what I expected to be its limit. I went in search of my favourite historical personage. First I located King John of England, then worked through his vassals until I found a certain Countess Isabelle, an heiress with huge tracts of land. Selecting her I scanned through her court and … yes, there he was, the husband who derived most of his landed status through her. William Marshal, aka The Greatest Knight. An old man with a bevy of historically accurate children, still wearing his armour with pride.

 

At this point my inner medievalist had a meltdown. William Marshal is in the game and playable! If ever there was an occasion where the internetism “ZOMG!!” applies, surely this is it.

 

When you start a campaign, there’s more detail available on the historical characters. You can see the traits they have been assigned by developers and grumble that so-and-so wasn’t that, or nod approvingly because it’s plainly apparent that what’s-his-face was a this. And then I noticed the range of ancestors. Yes, this means you can go on a paper chase to locate personages of the non-landholder variety, including a vast array of female characters.

 

Might I humbly suggest Paradox start working on a Pokemon-esque sub-game centred around locating historical people in CKII? I’d buy that as £1.59 DLC, especially if I can train my Anna Comnena to breathe fire and shoot ice beams from her fingertips, or make Frederick Barbarossa hurl lightning.

 

Rachel McFadden (aka frogbeastegg) has been gaming since she discovered the original Prince of Persia on the IBM 286sx PC. Whilst strategy and RPGs are her preferred genres, she is a multiplatform gamer who will play almost anything provided it isn’t sport, car racing, or multiplayer only. Under the frogbeastegg name Rachel has written guides for many of the Total War series, various AARs for strategy games, and a few pieces of fiction. When not engaged in reminding various virtual populaces that she is in fact the Supreme Ruler of the Universe and the One True Hero, Rachel can typically be found with her nose in a book. 

Tropico 4: The ingredients of a successful Caribbean holiday

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The week and a half I’ve played Tropico 4, the Latin American-themed city-builder, has been time well spent. I haven’t started the game’s campaign, but I’ve played enough of the sandbox mode to know I like it – and to know why. Tropico 4 does a number of things right, and while none of them is individually ground-breaking, each of them illustrates a principle of successful design. They are:

 

1. Difficulty – let me build in peace!

 

 

Difficulty in a game can come from two sources. In many (most?) games, from Shogun 2 to Dark Souls, the primary challenge comes from trying to make progress or avoid failure. If the Game Over/You Died screen is a constant companion, then we can say the game is “challenging”. However, even when the player is not at risk of game-ending failure, difficulty can still arise from self-imposed goals. If the game requires skilful play in order to meet those goals, then this is another form of challenge.

 

When it comes to city-builders, I’ll take the second type of challenge over the first. To me, these titles exemplify gaming as a “narrative of continuous progress”, and as such, I prefer them nice and relaxing. Oh, it’s one thing to have failure lurking in the background. The fear of failure keeps players on their toes – training enough heroes to fight off monsters in Majesty, building apartments and clinics to prevent an uprising in Tropico 4 – but as far as I’m concerned, actual game-overs should be easy to avoid.

 

And in this regard, Tropico 4 is perfect for me: with the default settings, it takes a lot of doing to lose a sandbox game. Instead, I like to see how effectively I can develop the island of Tropico (thriving economy, good healthcare, clean environment, educated populace, etc) within the constraints of money and time. After finishing five or six sandbox games, most as a benevolent leader and one as a brutal kleptocrat, I think I’m done with this play mode, but it was a lot of fun while it lasted. And there are options for players who want more or less of a challenge, ranging from a weaker/stronger world economy, to a more or less fractious populace, to a de facto god mode. The important thing is, I can tailor the game to meet my preferred play style.

 

As a contrasting example of what not to do in the city-builder genre, I offer city-builder/RTS/digital ant farm Majesty 2, which was built around an often rock-hard campaign. I would never use the word “relaxing” to describe that game, and while I did enjoy it, I’ll take Tropico 4 any day. (The original Majesty, which I preferred, was closer to Tropico 4 in that it offered a customisable skirmish mode where I could sit back and build, build, build.)

 

2. A sense of personality

 

 

Uninspired video game settings are a subject I’ve bemoaned before. How many generic high fantasy, WW2, or science fiction games do we really need? Luckily, Tropico 4 bursts with character. There’s a sense of place, of course – cheerful Caribbean music accompanies you throughout the game; your island’s key products include pineapples, papayas, sugar and rum; Tropicans speak in Spanish when you click them; and you attract tourists to your island with promises of sun and surf, plus booze for the spring-break crowd or native ruins for the eco-tourists.

 

But there’s more than that. Almost from the get-go, Tropico 4 is also defined by its – usually black – sense of humour. After clicking past the main menu, the first thing you’ll see is a loading screen, emblazoned with an irreverent (“Politicians are the same all over – they promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.”), bleak (anything from Augusto Pinochet), or, occasionally, off-the-wall (“If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic sport, I would win the gold medal.”) quote. And that cheerful cynicism permeates the entire game. It’s visible in the choice of traits for El Presidente – the screenshot above shows what the game thinks of “men of the people”. It’s visible in the flavour text for almost every action you take; my favourite is the ethnic village, an utterly bogus tourist trap that you can still show off via a “Geographic TV special”! And it’s visible right to the very end of the game, where one of the objectives on the scoring screen is filling the Presidential bank account. (The game doesn’t stint on ways to go about this. Embezzlement? Artifact-smuggling? Taking kickbacks on construction projects? All of the above?) It’s not the most heartening humour, but it’s distinct.

 

3. A little bit of real-world resemblance goes a long way

 

 

By no stretch of the imagination is Tropico 4 a serious political or economic simulator. But as goofy and abstracted as it is, you can still see the bones of real-life policies embodied within its systems.

 

My favourite example is the game’s economic model. Almost all businesses on Tropico are owned by the government, and the only tangible goods consumed by Tropicans are food and imported luxuries. (They do, however, consume a wide array of services.) As such, almost everything to come out of a Tropican farm or factory goes straight to the export market, the resulting dollars go straight to government coffers, and the reverse is true – imports deplete the government’s pocket. Making trade surpluses the main source of government income – there are no taxes on Tropico – is quite the abstraction!

 

However, the net effect is to encourage the player to pursue mercantilism, encouraging exports while minimising imports of consumer goods*. Specifically, it encourages the player to focus on exporting manufactured goods, since these are far, far more profitable than raw materials. In other words, the game effectively leads you down the path of export-led growth pursued by such countries as post-WW2 Germany, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and of course, China. While this is almost certainly a coincidence**, it’s still a thrill to play the game and realise I’m re-enacting a page out of modern history.

 

 

Other aspects of gameplay echo our world. Tropico’s education system isn’t just opiate for the masses – it takes a skilled labour force to operate those factories. (“Skilled”, in this context, meaning “high school educated”. I do wish the game offered more high-end export jobs for university-trained workers.) Building, then subsidising, apartments banishes shanty towns, which are both unsightly and bad for the people’s morale. This even extends to the superficial: one of the game’s silliest white elephants is a rotating golden statue of El Presidente (pictured above)… which happens to be lifted from real life. For folks with an interest in nation-building (or nation-ruining), Tropico 4 can feel like a basket filled with Easter eggs.

 

Conclusions

 

If I had to pick just one of the above strengths as a stand-out, it would be #3, seeing elements of real life reflected in the game. Just as there’s a joy in “reaching out to touch history” when playing Europa Universalis 3, so there’s a joy in reaching out to touch issues that could have come from the pages of a newspaper, or an interview with a statesman. But this is not to take away from the game’s other strengths. I laugh at its building descriptions and silly radio conversations, and settling down to develop my island in sandbox mode has been a pleasant, satisfying experience. Tropico 4 won’t hold my interest forever – I’m now ready to move on from the sandpit, either to the campaign or to another title. But even after I shelve the game, I may well read an article on postwar development months or years from now, look back, and smile when I remember my stint as leader of a Caribbean Tiger.

 

* Except for food. In-game, it’s often more efficient to export cash crops and manufactured goods and just import relatively cheap food.

 

** Supply-chain management is part and parcel of the city-builder genre, and manufacturing has been a path to virtual riches at least as far back as Colonization.

How to add AI players to a Shogun 2 multiplayer skirmish

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With its quick PvP skirmishes and its co-op campaign, Shogun 2 is my go-to game when I want to play multiplayer – but sometimes I want to play a co-op skirmish, with human and computer players. Until a couple of days ago, I thought this was impossible (not to mention a very odd omission), but it turns out the game does support comp stomps. This is how to set them up.

 

First, look at the top row of the screen:

 

See the silhouettes representing slots for human players? Delete a human player slot.

 

The screen should now look like this:

 

 

Then click the computer icon in the bottom-right hand corner of the box. The screen should now look like this:

 

Tadaa! You have now added an AI player – in this case, the Chosokabe. Click that AI player’s banner, and you can change its clan. Have fun stomping those comps!